ing from Brazil or Spain, they have to go somewhere once they get here. Some of those destinations are going to be data centers that are located in Virginia Beach, but there’s very few that will not want to get to Ashburn, and everybody that has traffic wants redundancy. A company typically will have two diverse paths because fiber cuts happen; accidents happen. We have a very solid, diverse option that will be able to go from Virginia Beach to Ashburn without going up the 95 corridor where there’s a lot of traffic.
VB: Let’s talk a little bit about Clarity Com- munications. So I understand that is in part a strategy to approach potential military clients? Biltz: Yes, it is. I’ve known the company for a long time. It has very talented execu- tives, a small team … and they built a really terrific business servicing the military and government businesses throughout the Carolinas and Georgia. They had gotten to a point, like a lot of small companies, that they needed capital to upgrade their network and to reinvest significantly. The opportunity to bring them into the Lumos family was one that they were excited about, because they could continue to invest in their network and bring their skill set to our military bases. There are [more than] 400 military facilities in and around our 10,000 miles. We immediately put them to work, and they’ve made traction. I think we’ve sold at least two, maybe three of the accounts since we’ve started. It’s a skill set that we just didn’t have, and they know that space very well.
VB: And now you’ve also bought some data centers [from DC74]? Biltz: Yes. Again, another entrepreneur [DC74 CEO Tareq Amin] that we’ve known for a long time … We want to bring the energy of a startup [to Lumos], bring in some really talented, skilled executives or entrepreneurs that know how to take care of customers, know how to move fast, know how to be responsive … Tareq and DC74 are perfect examples of that. He’s got a very nice business. He’s about less than 50 percent at capacity, and we plan to grow that business. It won’t be the last acquisition at the end of the day, that’s for sure.
VB: That’s what I was going to ask. Do you plan to add more?
Biltz: We like the data center business. What we won’t do is go to Ashburn and build a big data center. We’re not going to try to compete nationwide. We like the large [local customers]. We think that there’s a market for large locals, and we see it in our own current data facilities. I like to say that I look at them as equipment rooms — they’ve changed the name to data centers — providing reliable and price-competitive space and power in the right locations. We like Charlotte. Charlotte is a market that’s growing rapidly, and [DC74 has] the nice share of that market. We’ll integrate that into our current customers, as well. I don’t know what the right number will be as far as the percent of our revenues, but we think … it could grow to 10, 15 percent of our revenues ... Over time, data centers will get closer to the customers.
VB: And that path we were talking about from Virginia Beach up to Ashburn, do you already have that? Biltz: There’s one area that we will be building to add capacity, but 90 percent of it is in place today.
VB: Anything that we didn’t touch that you would like to mention? Biltz: I would just say one thing: Why do people do business with us? It is because of our people. I really want to emphasize that was part of why, I think, EQT ended up acquiring us. We’re very transpar- ent. We’re very customer focused. We’re very responsive … I’m a history buff, a [Winston] Churchill fan, so when I try to put it in perspective where we were in our transformation, I would describe 2013 as the Battle of Britain. We may not have won the war then, but we knew we were going to after that because we were battle hard. We asked this team to take pay freezes. We asked this team to give up their bonuses in order to invest in the network. [Some people expected many employees to leave, but] the lowest turnover we ever had was the year we asked our people to make a sacrifice. They saw what we were doing with the network … bringing first-class services in … To every new employee, I tell them, “You don’t know how good a team you are joining.” That is something that is part of the DNA of Lumos.
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