Hosting provider Cogeco Peer 1 relaunches as Aptum Technologies

Managed service provider celebrates independence with new name and offerings

Cogeco Peer 1 has rebranded as Aptum Technologies after splitting from its previous owner earlier this year.

The managed hosting provider was a subsidiary of Canadian firm Cogeco Communications but was acquired as a standalone business by private equity house Digital Colony in May.

Aptum is the Latin word for 'adapt', said CEO Susan Bowen (pictured), adding that it is a more fitting name for the company.

"We wanted to not only take ourselves away from [being] just a business unit within a global Canadian telco," she explained to CRN.

"Now, with complete control, we wanted to take advantage of the fact that we actually are the coming together of seven different legacy companies.

"This is more than just a rebrand, it's about giving ourselves a new identity and our vision is to unlock that potential of data as infrastructure.

"We have over 4,000 customers globally and each of them is asking for more and more hybrid managed solutions and they're asking for accessibility around 5G-enabled technology.

"So because we have this great opportunity to relaunch ourselves, we've chosen not just a new company name that people can say, but a company name that has meaning."

The newly titled Aptum bills itself as a cloud service provider as well as an MSP, and will be launching a Managed AWS offering from today. It already provides a similar Microsoft Azure offering for public cloud and its own private managed cloud capability.

It has its origins in hosting and connectivity and Bowen stated that it has retained these capabilities, with datacentres scattered across North America and one in Portsmouth.

"Because we own our datacentres, a multi-cloud offer and we have our own private cloud offer, we wanted to bring that managed AWS into the portfolio," Bowen said.

"We've been an AWS reseller for some time, but we've been working on being able to do a managed solution with a combination of our own skill set, our own services, our own value-add and we're now working on the next phases of cloud management portals, which are truly hybrid."

The Toronto-headquartered firm has two separate business units: datacentre and fibre.

The datacentre unit includes its cloud managed services and connectivity support. Its fibre unit is focused on being a neutral 5G host on the 3,000km of laid fibre it owns in Montreal and Toronto.

The chief exec added that Aptum is coming across Claranet most often when pursuing business, and is encountering traditional competitors, such as Rackspace, less as it moves away from its sole focus on hosting.

"When we're going for business, we trip over Claranet more than most," she stated.

"That's where it's quite interesting because I think the market is shifting. We don't tend to see companies in Europe that much that would be like [Canadian Microsoft cloud distributor] Sherweb, which we tend to cross over with.

"We're working more collaboratively with other organisations such as Cancom UK [formerly OCSL].

"We don't see those resellers or OEM providers because we tend to provide the hardware as part of the service as a true managed service offering."

The company has launched three partner programmes in the last year, which Bowen said have "cleaned up" the basic terms for partners and the company intends to develop a global presence, working with VARs.

Bowen herself has been in the CEO role for just under a year, coming from her previous position as VP and GM of EMEA for Cogeco Peer 1.

"[In the first year] it has been about taking this business standalone, really standing ourselves up as a company that is stable and focused on our customers," she declared.

"And then completely restructuring the company to set ourselves up for growth, and that's really what I'm looking forward to."