Changing the landscape

TERACO HAS BEEN making waves in the South African ICT industry ever since it opened its multimillion-rand, vendor-neutral data centre in Cape Town in February this year.

Within two months of opening their doors, they have already signed seven of the biggest ISPs and networks as clients.

The company says appeal of the new data centre lies in its vendor neutrality a first for the local market. It means that Teraco customers can connect to any carrier, network operator or service provider, as well as any other customer, within the data centre, without restriction. There are standard, open interconnection policies between all service providers and customers.

CEO Tim Parsonson, who also founded Storm Telecom, explains that the timing for the business was right. "Communication minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri created a de facto complete liberalisation of the South African telecommunications space when the courts affirmed the right to self-provision.

"As a result, 533 operators have been awarded electronic communications network services (ECNS) licences enabling them to build networks," he says. "The creation of the vendor neutral data centre is using the deregulation of the industry to allow carriers, corporates, ISPs and IT service providers to get unrestricted choice in what they do with their data, in a secure facility built to international best practices."

VENDOR NEUTRAL

To date, outsourced data centre facilities have typically been offered by the ISPs, bundled with their internet access or managed hosting services, or by the large IT outsourcing companies, bundled with outsourcing, systems integration or hosted application services. In contrast, Teraco limits its activities to only providing infrastructure and facilities to avoid all conflict of interest.

"There is absolute focus on taking care of the physical space and honouring our quite punitive service level agreements," says Lex van Wyk, managing director of Teraco Data Environments.

"We remain neutral and offer customers the freedom of choice to purchase or sell products and services to whomever they wish. You want to buy your connectivity from one company, internet access from another, and then do back-ups with yet another? That`s okay with us. It`s your business. We don`t ever compete with our customers. We just want to be sure that the data centre is perfectly in order - all the time."

Teraco takes care of the practical side of data centre management such as infrastructure redundancy, climate control, guaranteed electrical power, security and protection and maintenance. Being vendor neutral, Teraco promotes `multisourcing` where clients can acquire their internet, telecom and related services from various providers within the data centre.

"Moving a data centre is a big upheaval for any company, but because we offer all of these services in one data centre, this will be the last move a company needs ever make - any changes are simple to arrange within the environment," says Parsonson.

GETTING THE BIG GUYS ON BOARD

Parsonson and Van Wyk explain that Teraco`s investment in infrastructure is giving the company the edge in drawing big customers. "Hosting requirements are growing faster than economic growth. This is obviously a big headache for corporates - a growing headache. People want to outsource that headache, and we provide a perfect destination," says Parsonson.

The Teraco data centre in Kenilworth went live with carrier connections from both Neotel and Telkom in place, other carriers, such as Vodacom Business, are in the pipeline, and points of presence from ISPs WebAfrica and FastNet. Telkom is currently finalising network interconnection and transmission services, which are expected to be available to customers within the Teraco data centre. Teraco is planning a second phase to the data centre - to be situated in Johannesburg - within the next two years.