CyrusOne Brand Guidelines: A 2000 Texas Start, Cincinnati Bell & a KKR-GIP Take-Private

Two founders, a Texas footprint and a phone company.

CyrusOne is a data-centre owner, developer and operator with its headquarters in Dallas, Texas. English Wikipedia, citing the Houston Business Journal, says the company was formed in July 2000 by David Ferdman and Larry Bursten, who had met when companies they had each founded were bought by IXC Communications. Wikipedia adds that the private-equity firm ABRY Partners acquired the business in July 2007. In its first decade it was a regional colocation operator: a company that builds and runs secure, powered and cooled buildings in which customers rent space for their own servers and network equipment.

The step that changed its scale came in 2010. Converge Digest reported on 11 June 2010 that Cincinnati Bell, the Ohio telephone company, had completed its purchase of CyrusOne, a deal first announced that May. The report described CyrusOne as one of the largest colocation operators in Texas and said the purchase brought seven data centres in Houston, Dallas and Austin. Cincinnati Bell’s chief executive, Jack Cassidy, framed the deal as part of a plan to become a colocation provider for Fortune 1000 companies, and said the combined data-centre business of the two companies made Cincinnati Bell one of the larger data-centre owners in the United States.

Under Cincinnati Bell the company kept building in Texas and beyond. Wikipedia records that in September 2011 CyrusOne bought land in Chandler, Arizona, for a data-centre campus, and that in 2012 it opened a large facility in Carrollton, Texas. In January 2013 CyrusOne became a public company through an initial public offering, and Wikipedia says that by 2015 Cincinnati Bell had sold almost its entire stake. By late 2019 the company traded on Nasdaq under the ticker CONE, as ZDNet noted in a December 2019 report.

From Texas halls to Frankfurt and Milan.

As a listed company CyrusOne grew partly through acquisitions. Wikipedia lists the purchase of the data-centre operator Cervalis in July 2015 and, in March 2016, a data centre in Aurora, Illinois, bought from the exchange group CME Group in a sale-and-leaseback deal; CyrusOne broke ground on a further building on that property in December 2016. In June 2016 it bought a 40-acre parcel in Loudoun County, Virginia.

Europe followed in August 2017, when CyrusOne acquired Zenium Data Centers, which had facilities in London and Frankfurt, according to Wikipedia. The company’s own site now lists sites in London, Frankfurt, Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam and Madrid, with further Frankfurt buildings in development. In March 2026 CyrusOne said it had broken ground on its first data centre in Italy, a building called MIL1 in Segrate, on the edge of Milan; the company described it as the first of two planned Milan facilities, with 27 megawatts of IT capacity in three data halls.

Not every headline was about growth. In December 2019 ZDNet reported that CyrusOne had been hit by the REvil ransomware. A company spokesperson told the publication that six of its managed-service customers, located mainly in its New York data centre, had experienced availability problems because devices on their networks were encrypted, and that its colocation, IX and IP network services were not involved. The company said it was working with law enforcement and forensic firms.

Today CyrusOne says it operates more than 60 data centres across North America, EMEA and APAC. It describes three main offers: build-to-suit campuses for hyperscale cloud companies, colocation for large enterprises, and interconnection. Its US list runs from Chandler and Aurora to Council Bluffs in Iowa, Quincy in Washington and a long row of buildings in Sterling, Virginia, while in Asia it lists Osaka as in development.

How data-centre operators present themselves.

Data-centre operators sell something most of their customers will rarely see in person. The product is space, power, cooling and connections inside buildings that are secure by design, so the industry has built a recognisable visual language to stand in for the real thing. Long white halls lined with rows of server racks, often lit in a cool blue, are the most common image on websites, in reports and on trade-show stands.

The second stock image is the campus from the air. Aerial photographs show low, windowless buildings set out in a grid, with car parks, substations and fenced yards around them. Close-ups fill in the detail: banks of cooling towers or chillers on a roof, rows of backup generators, cable trays crowded with fibre and power cords, and engineers in hi-vis vests checking a tablet between the racks. The pictures are meant to suggest scale, order and control rather than any single product.

Names and marks tend to follow the same logic. Many operators use short coined names, initials or plain descriptive words, set in clean sans-serif type, and organise their sites with city or airport codes and numbers. Colour schemes lean on blues, greys and one sharper accent, and campaigns talk about capacity, connectivity and growth in measured, technical language. Because the buildings look alike, the difference is often carried by naming, maps of locations and the way a company describes its customers.

Much of this identity is presented in person at industry gatherings such as Datacloud Global Congress and PTC, where operators, investors and network companies meet. Stands, keynote slides and printed site maps there tend to repeat the same visual cues as the websites: hall photography, campus renders and lists of markets. The guides in this group look at how individual operators use those shared conventions.

A take-private and a long list of site codes.

The listed period ended in 2022. Wikipedia records that in March 2022 CyrusOne sold its Houston assets and that, the same month, the company was acquired by funds managed by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), taking it private. Both investors remain involved: when CyrusOne named John Hatem chief executive on 30 July 2026, its release quoted partners from KKR and GIP. The company said Hatem had joined in 2011 and had most recently served as president, and that his predecessor Eric Schwartz was stepping down as part of long-term succession planning.

The way CyrusOne labels its estate is one of the more visible parts of its identity. Its website names each building with a short code built from a city or airport abbreviation and a number, such as DFW1 for Carrollton, NVA1 for Sterling, FRA1 for Frankfurt and LON1 for London. Sites still being built are tagged “In Development”. The company describes itself as a data-centre “owner, developer, and operator”, and its pages talk about hyperscale campuses, high-density deployments and engineering services such as power planning and floor layouts rather than consumer products.

For a design guide, CyrusOne shows how a business that began with a handful of Texas buildings presents itself as a global developer: a short coined name, plain engineering language and a site list organised by code. Compare the identities of Digital Realty and CoreSite. For this guide we use a deep hall navy, a raised-floor grey and a coolant teal with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CyrusOne’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.