Quickbooks maker Intuit is selling its largest data center, the company said, as it advances its strategy of migrating services to the public cloud and moving away from owning hosting platforms.
The 240,000 square-foot, tier III data center in Quincy, Washington, is being bought by H5 Data Centers, a privately-owned operator.
Intuit said it expects the sale to result in an operating loss of between $75 million and $85 million, but that the loss would be offset by tax benefits, share-based compensation, and the reorganization of a subsidiary during the quarter. Earnings per share should not be affected, Intuit said.
“We chose to move to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate developer productivity and innovation for our customers, and to accommodate spikes in customer usage through the tax season,” said Tayloe Stansbury, Intuit’s executive vice president and chief technology officer. “Our TurboTax Online customers were served entirely from AWS during the latter part of this tax season, and we expect to finish transitioning QuickBooks Online this year.”
The company issued revised GAAP operating income guidance and reiterated revenue, non-GAAP operating income, and earnings per share guidance for the fourth quarter (ending July 31) and full fiscal year 2018.
The company said it still expected revenue of $940 million to $960 million for the fourth quarter, as well as adjusted earnings per share of $0.22 to $0.24.
For fiscal year 2018, Intuit forecasts revenue of $5.915 billion to $5.935 billion, operating income growth of 5% to 6%, and non-GAAP operating income growth of 12% to 13%.
Intuit opened the facility in 2009 not far from large data centers built by Yahoo and Microsoft. It said it was one of the first companies of scale with enterprise-class data to move to the public cloud.
H5 has more than 2 million square feet of data center space under management. According to H5, the Quincy location comes with a 100% Washington state sales and use tax abatement on data-center equipment.
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