We are proud to announce that we have been nominated for the Vlaams-Brabant 2022 Trends Gazelles in the Large Companies category. Our organic growth is 10% per year, and has been since the beginning. Last year, we even achieved 20% growth. This year we expect growth of 45%, of which 35% will be external growth. Furthermore, we are proud to announce that we are now also focusing on a hyperscale offering.

Scale and therefore growth are key for a data center

Trends Magazine is hosting the Trends Gazelles awards this year for the 21st time. Trends nominates 250 Trends Gazelles per province. These are the small, medium-sized or large Belgian companies that have recorded the best growth figures over the past five years. It's about cash flow, number of employees and added value. In total, there are around 2,000 growth companies nominated across the various categories and provinces. They have one thing in common: they are all fast-growing companies that are important to our country’s economy. LCL has been nominated in the large companies category, in the province of Flemish Brabant.

‘From day one, we have focused on solid and continuous growth,' says CEO Laurens van Reijen. ‘Even then, it was clear to me that we would only win the data center race if we achieved sufficient scale. After all, services are very important in ICT land. And you can only offer a full range of services if you have sufficient specialist staff, and therefore a large enough scale. The team is crucial to making a difference. We have 36 specialists who work in a customer-oriented way. We have the largest team in data center land. Customers are also becoming increasingly demanding. Certification, for example, is becoming ever more important. Customers want certain guarantees before they entrust the technological heart of their business to a data center; it's only logical! Our data centers have an impressive list of certifications; you can only acquire these once a certain scale and therefore growth have been achieved.’

‘Today we have 5 locations, 3 of which are strategically positioned around Brussels, with one centrally located in Flanders and one centrally positioned in Wallonia. This allows us to provide efficient service to both the capital and the rest of the country. All five still have huge expansion potential. Since the outset, our growth has been 10% per year; last year, the figure was as high as 20%. In order to cope with growth, we invest considerable amounts in our country's digital infrastructure every year. And we continue to innovate...,' says Laurens van Reijen.

trends gazelle

LCL Data Centers continues to grow

Over a period of five years, a lot has happened at LCL. These are just a few of the many things we have accomplished:

  • Several new partnerships and collaborations concluded;
  • The growth of our team, from 14 employees at the end of 2016 to 36 staff today;
  • Comprehensive certification: All our data centers have official ISO 14001, ISO 45001, ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certification, which means that all LCL's data centers apply the best practices according to the international standards for environmental management, safety management, quality management and information security;
  • The further expansion of LCL Brussels-West (Aalst), which was the first data center in Belgium to be awarded double certification by the Uptime Institute, namely the Tier III Design certificate and the Tier III Constructed Facility certificate;
  • A takeover in Gembloux: As a result, we can now also offer our services in the south of our country, via our LCL Wallonia One data center;
  • A sustainable and green policy: We've been supporting this for a long time. To make this a reality, we set up the Climate Neutral Data Center Pact together with a number of leading cloud infrastructure services and data centers in Europe. The goal is to become climate-neutral by 2030. We also recently endorsed the most ambitious goal of the Science Based Targets initiative: To limit global warming to 1.5°C.

Next step: our hyperscale offering

And LCL continues to grow and innovate. This year, the expected growth is a staggering 45%. 35% is the result of an acquisition. In addition, we will generate 10% organic growth. The data center company is now also focusing on hyperscale data centers. I.e., they have special facilities for large cloud providers, for example, or other large partners. This is already provided for in LCL's brand new (second) data center in Aalst. This will definitely be developed further in the future.

Laurens van Reijen, Managing Director of LCL Data Centers: ‘I would like to thank my hard-working and dedicated team for their motivation and commitment, day after day. They are the driving force behind LCL's success. I'm hugely looking forward to the future of LCL, with my team by my side. Let's continue our annual growth of 10% and remain successful together into the future!’

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