When recalling his experience at the 2012 Telecom Exchange in New York City a few weeks ago, Zayo Group President, President, Sales and Customer Management David Howson said, “It had a buzz and a vibe about it.” It was Howson and Zayo’s first time at the prestigious telecom industry event, and he felt at home because of the success of the fiber industry right now – and Zayo is a direct contributor to the industry’s success.

“There was a lot of buzz about cloud and how network providers are supporting the exponential growth in cloud offerings and cloud services. It’s developing in real-time right in front of us, and we feel our Ethernet offerings are prime to support the cloud,” he told TechZone360 in an exclusive interview.

With its core philosophy of owning and operating fiber optic networks, Zayo, an international provider of fiber-based bandwidth infrastructure and network-neutral colocation and interconnection services, has recently expanded its network in the greater Denver area.  The fiber build will encompass Fort Collins, Greeley, Loveland, Longmont, Boulder, Colorado Springs, and the larger Denver area.

This fiber expansion will bolster Zayo's presence in the Central Business Districts as well as the Denver Technology Center. The company’s 521-route mile Denver expansion provides considerable support to the area's largest industries.

“We build and invest a lot in new network expansions predominantly in a success-based manor,” Howson said. “For example, we take an existing client relationship and as an anchor or a springboard to expand existing markets or move into new markets.”

A highly acquisitive company with 20 completed acquisitions and number 21 (FiberGate Inc.) to be completed in the coming months, Zayo has also announced the completion of its acquisition of national Bandwidth Infrastructure provider AboveNet – Zayo’s largest acquisition to date. Adding this network expansion to the Zayo and AboveNet assets, Zayo will have 900 route miles of fiber network in the Denver area.

“Similar to Zayo, AboveNet has had a lot of focus with the financial verticals, particularly supporting their very high needs networks in terms of bandwidth low-latency quality. So, finance is going to be a continued focused sector for us,” said Howson.

The combined company will operate in 45 states in the U.S. and seven countries in North America and Europe. The network spans over 61,000 route miles with 4.6 million miles of fiber and serves 9,000 buildings including datacenters, telecommunications hubs, enterprise buildings and cellular towers.

“With the addition of AboveNet’s talent and assets, Zayo is well positioned to be the leading provider of Bandwidth Infrastructure solutions to the largest consumers of bandwidth in the US. With transatlantic capacity, a deep London metro network and access to major cities in Europe, we can begin to address customer needs in key international markets as well,” said Dan Caruso of Zayo.

AboveNet was also a major Internet provider, operating an extensive Tier 1 backbone network across the US, Europe and Japan.  Zayo and AboveNet staff have been working together to develop an integration plan consisting of network integration, organization plans, and a set of processes and IT systems expected to be mostly complete in three months.

Additionally, AboveNet had a successful agent program, and Zayo will be announcing shortly that it will be expanding the agent program across the entire Zayo network as well as products and services, according to Howson.

He said, “[Looking ahead in 2012], our focus is maintaining the growth momentum that the two companies, both AboveNet and Zayo have had, making sure that we really focus on our customer needs as we go through this integration period.”