SaaS company Blackbaud closes four data centers

Software-as-a-Service company Blackbaud has closed four colocation data center deployments as it continues its move to the cloud.

The company develops CRM, SQL databases, and analytics software for nonprofit organizations.

“We tightly managed our largest expense, which is ‘people’ costs,” CEO Mike Gianoni said in an earnings call.

“Furthermore, we renegotiated some of our largest vendor contracts such as Microsoft Azure and AWS and simultaneously reduced our footprint by closing four data centers last year.”

Gianoni did not detail the extent of the cloud deployments, but said that “the build on AWS and Azure is getting pretty big,” and added that “those are [like a] single data center environment platform, so it’s less complex than having four colo data centers.”

CFO Tony Boor added: “We’ve closed four colo data centers. Those renegotiations are going to help because we’re obviously moving more volume to those third-party cloud providers. We still have several more data centers to close and networks to shut down.”

The news comes the same week as Uber announced that it would close its data centers and move to clouds operated by Google and Oracle. Data Center Dynamics