Blackbaud Shuts Down Four Data Centers As It Transitions To The Cloud

As part of its ongoing transition to the cloud, Software-as-a-Service provider Blackbaud has terminated four colocation data center deployments. The company creates CRM, SQL databases, and analytics software for charitable organizations, . However, Blackbaud has been covertly laying off employees throughout 2022 while reporting a 10.8% increase in revenue in the fourth quarter. In an earnings call, CEO Mike Gianoni stated that they carefully handled their biggest expense, "people" costs. He continued by saying that last year they also decreased their footprint by shutting four data centers while concurrently renegotiating some of their major vendor contracts, including those with Microsoft Azure and AWS. 

Gianoni did not go into depth about the size of the cloud installations, but he did mention that AWS and Azure are becoming more large platforms, similar to a single data center environment, making it simpler than having four colocation data centers. Four colo data centers were shut down, according to CFO Tony Boor. These renegotiations will be beneficial since they will shift more volume to those outside cloud service providers. They still need to shut down a number of networks and data centers. The information was released the same week Uber declared it would shut its data centers and switch to Google and Oracle clouds.