ANS ditches plans for £8m datacentre

Manchester-based reseller claims investment would be too capital-intensive and plans to work with third-party providers instead

ANS Group has ditched its plans to build an £8m datacentre in Manchester, admitting the move would be too expensive and possibly not as flexible as it would have liked.

Last September the reseller announced it had agreed a 15-year lease on a 20,000 square foot datacentre facility in Manchester's Sharp Project development – a digital hub based in the east of the city. At the time it said it planned to invest £8m in the datacentre in the next three years and that it would help grow the business as well as create up to 100 new jobs in the coming years.

Despite having started work on the facility, ANS concluded the investment would be "too capital-intensive" and might not deliver the flexibility it needs and so canned the plans.

The firm's managing director Paul Sweeney explained why the decision was taken.

"The growth of our cloud services led us to reappraise our datacentre strategy and we took the decision to partner with trusted third-party providers instead of committing to our own infrastructure, which would be capital-intensive and may not provide the flexibility we need to best serve our clients," he said.

"This decision has meant that we are able to achieve the best-possible efficiencies for our clients and maintain low-cost, high-quality service provision. We continue to support the Sharp Project and other initiatives in the region that champion Manchester as an important European technology hub."

Last week ANS signed a deal worth more than £1m with third-party provider M247, which the reseller claims will provide it with secure datacentre accommodation and high-capacity networks.

In its last fiscal year, ANS' pre-tax profits rocketed by nearly three quarters annually, but sales at the VAR took a £6m hit as it walked away from low-margin pass-through government framework business.