CME Group, has entered into a strategic agreement to offload its suburban Chicago data center in Aurora, Illinois to global data center services provider, CyrusOne (NASDAQ: CONE), for a sum of $130 million, according to a CME Group statement.
CME Group’s decision to sell its data center will in no way hinder its electronic trading capabilities. On the contrary, the sale will see CME Group enter into a 15-year lease for data center space, which will see the continuation of its electronic Trading Platform , CME Globex from the data center. Moreover, CME Globex’s services will still be offered, albeit out of the freshly leased venue.
Per the new leasing structure, CME Group has left itself open to the possibility of expanding its colocation services – this will also see potential enhancements between CME Group and CyrusOne, whereby augmenting the overall scope of its services suite to a mutual customer base. CME Group portends the extension of such services as connectivity, hosting, and myriad data offerings.
This transaction allows us to enter into a long-term lease to meet our data center needs
According to CME Group Chief Financial Officer (CFO) John Pietrowicz, in a recent statement on the sale, "CME Group is pleased to work with CyrusOne to maintain our co-location services while reducing our real estate holdings in line with our growth strategy.”
“This transaction allows us to enter into a long-term lease to meet our data center needs while focusing our resources on what we do best - running our exchanges, providing global Risk Management and offering a broad range of technology services. Further, by entering into this relationship with CyrusOne, CME helps to ensure that our customers will have cost-efficient access to an even broader set of infrastructure and data services, including disaster recovery, cloud access, data storage and high-performance computing,” he added.
"The acquisition-leaseback of this facility offers unique advantages to our customers involved in the global financial markets by providing connectivity to those transacting on the CME Globex platform, reiterated Gary Wojtaszek, President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), CyrusOne, in an accompanying statement.
"This acquisition helps solidify our position in the financial services market and will create additional FinTech opportunities by offering a unique ecosystem to our financial, energy, enterprise, and cloud customers."
The deal takes place after less than twenty-four hours since the announcement of CME’s partnership with Duco Technologies, having launched a joint agreement to restructure its respective member firms’ fee control processes.
