DigiCo tries shrinking to greatness
After two years and $1.6 billion in lost market value, David Di Pilla has decided less is more.
Two hours feels like a long time when you're losing thousands of dollars in potential revenue. Just ask Tabcorp's chief executive Gillon McLachlan about the morning of August 24 when his betting company's servers collapsed due to an unexplained outage at DigiCo's Ultimo data centre.
Fortunately for Tabcorp, a couple of hours on a Monday morning is not peak punting time. HMC Capital chief executive David Di Pilla was reluctant to say anything about the matter besides pointing out the outage was caused by "operator error" which is his way of saying "human error" (the person in question was a contractor who no longer works for DigiCo). [[It's not the first time Tabcorp's been burnt by an outage at Ultimo. In 2020 it lost more than $100 million in turnover due to a 27-hour outage on Melbourne Cup weekend, although DigiCo did not own the site at the time.]]
HMC Capital owns just over 21 per cent of DigiCo whose $4.3 billion IPO in December 2024 was core to Di Pilla's original goal of building a home-grown version of Blackstone. The outage is an embarrassing but not uncommon operational problem for data centre operators such as DigiCo but it pales in comparison to the need to stave off a bigger threat: widespread concerns about the commercial and community relationships that underpin their business models.
If we have established anything at all from the past two months of market chaos and stakeholder upset, it's that there is very little any data centre operator says that can be relied upon completely.
