The official launch of hosting and cloud services firm Leaseweb Canada took place on Wednesday at an event held in Montreal, and with it, this country officially became the third largest international region by revenue for the organization’s parent, Amsterdam-based Leaseweb Global.

Leaseweb was formed 25 years ago by two Dutch pilots – Con Zwinkels and Laurens Rosenthal – who, according to the company, “understood the importance of reliability and global connections. They crossed borders. They safely brought passengers, crew, and craft around the world.

“Witnessing the growth of the internet around the world, our founders envisioned how they could use their skills and experience to build the internet as a service, making it accessible and available to everyone.”

Since its formation, Leaseweb has continually expanded across the globe, and its entry into the Canadian market occurred in 2021 when it acquired data centre provider iWeb, which operated three facilities in Montreal and, powered by 99 per cent renewable hydroelectricity, hosted, according to a release, “thousands of servers for clients across a range of industry sectors.”

CEO and co-founder Zwinkels remarked at the time that the company had “followed the development of iWeb with great interest for a number of years, and as a business with similar DNA to our own, we know they bring a wide range of complementary services and skills to our presence in Canada. They live and breathe hosting.”

The prelude to this week’s customer and partner event, the transition of iWeb to Leaseweb Canada, was formally announced in February. The company also said it would be rolling out new products that included Acronis Backup, Leaseweb Cloud Connect and Leaseweb VMware vSphere.

Roger Brulotte, the CEO of the Canadian operation, said in a release that “today marks an exciting new chapter for our Canadian team and our customers, giving them access to a larger network footprint and a growing portfolio of services in public and private cloud.”

Late last month, Leaseweb launched its VMware vSphere and HCI (Hyperconverged Infrastructure) offering in Canada, which it said will help “companies migrate their business-critical applications to a secured and highly redundant platform, with data that resides in Canada.”

Leaseweb VMware vSphere, the company added, enables organizations to deploy virtualization environments of any size into dedicated infrastructure, without long-term investments.

“As more and more organizations are embracing a cloud-first strategy, our mission is to make the transition to cloud easier, with a platform that will meet their unique business and workload-specific needs,” said Brulotte.

In an interview with IT World Canada on Tuesday, he talked about the importance of Montreal as a data centre hub.

“If you look at the last five years, Montreal has been called little Ashburn (Ashburn, located in Virginia near Washington, D.C., is known as the Data Centre Capital of the World). If you look at the hyperscalers, most of them are now in Montreal, which has brought in a lot of potential business to us. There are a lot of employees with high skills, which is good for our organization and it’s good for the market.”

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