Nelson Fonseca is the new Chief Executive Officer for Cyxtera Technologies, the company said this week, as Cyxtera founder and CEO Manuel Medina has been elevated to the position of Executive Chairman for both Cyxtera and AppGate, the recently-announced spin-out of security businesses. Medina will provide strategic guidance and counsel for the two companies.
Nelson Fonseca, the CEO of Cyxtera Technologies.
“I’m looking forward to working closely with both teams as we continue to transform the cybersecurity and data center industries, and I am delighted that my long-time friend and colleague Nelson Fonseca will take the reins as Cyxtera CEO,” said Medina.
Cyxtera is a security-focused colocation provider offering a resilient infrastructure platform for critical applications. The company operates 2.6 million square feet of space in 57 data centers, and has 3,500 enterprises, government agencies and service providers among its customers.
Fonseca has more than 20 years of experience as an executive in the IT infrastructure sector. He served in several leadership positions alongside Medina at Terremark, ultimately as President of the Verizon Terremark unit after Verizon’s acquisition of the company for an enterprise value of $2 billion. Fonseca started his career as an engineer in the wireless network division at Nortel Networks and held various business development positions at Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore).
“I’m excited to have the opportunity to lead a great company and global provider of colocation services,” said Fonseca. “The team and I look forward to building on our position as a market leader in retail colocation by expanding our highly-connected data center footprint, broadening our global partner ecosystem, and further innovating our CXD platform to deliver a truly world-class customer experience.”
New Role for Industry Icon Medina
The transition to executive chairman is the latest milestone for Medina, who has been a leading figure in both the data center industry and the South Florida business community.
Medina founded Terremark with a vision for a data center that would make south Florida the gateway to Latin America for internet connectivity. In 2000 the company built The NAP of the America in Miami, one of the world’s largest data centers, just as the dot-com boom was receding. Medina guided Terremark through a long period of financial challenges, but gained momentum by sharpening its focus on security and virtualization services, which were just emerging as a major tool for IT operations.
Manuel Medina, the Executive Chairman of Cyxtera Technologies and AppGate.
After Terremark was acquired by Verizon in 2011, Medina began investing in emerging companies at Medina Capital, acquiring security-focused startups Cryptzone, Catbird, Easy Solutions and Brainspace. In 2016 Medina Capital teamed with investors including BC Partners and Longview Asset Management to buy the data centers portfolio of CenturyLink for $2.15 billion.
The resulting company was renamed Cyxtera Technologies, integrating the data center infrastructure with the security expertise of Media Capital’s cybersecurity holdings. It has developed the Cyxtera Extensible Data Center Platform (CXD) to deliver colocation space with cloud-like “on demand” provisioning speed, along with a point-and-click interface to create virtual cross-connects.
Earlier this month, Cyxtera said it would spin out its cybersecurity business into a separate company called AppGate, which offers a software-defined perimeter to secure critical infrastructure.
“Our recently announced spin-out of our cybersecurity business positions both Cyxtera and AppGate to take advantage of unique and substantial growth opportunities and to drive innovation and change into their respective sectors,” said Medina.
Data Center Frontier is edited by Rich Miller, the data center industry’s most experienced journalist. For more than 20 years, Rich has profiled the key role played by data centers in the Internet revolution.