February 28, 2009 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) –
Teraco has opened South Africa’s first vendor neutral data center, it was reported recently. The center is located in Cape Town, the country’s capital. The center opens after legal action that allowed South Africa’s carriers, corporates, ISPs and IT service providers to get “unrestricted choice in what they do with their data”. As a result, 533 electronic communications network services (ECNS) licenses have been awarded and multiple operators are building networks.
“The timing for this business is right,” suggests company Managing Director, Lex van Wyk. “A number of operators are building networks and need to interconnect. So now, companies can benefit from vendor neutral data centers that give them global best practice facilities, unrestricted choice and access to many players in the industry, under one roof.”
Outsourced data centre facilities in South Africa have typically been offered by the Internet Service Providers, 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. Teraco, however, “limits its activities to only providing infrastructure and facilities to avoid all conflicts of interest”.
“There is absolute focus on taking care of the physical space and honouring our quite punitive service level agreements,” added Mr. van Wyk. “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.”
The Teraco Data Centre features carrier connections from Neotel and FastNet, with Vodacom Business and Telkom in the pipeline, and points of presence from leading ISPs such as WebAfrica.
"Telkom fully endorses the development of a carrier neutral data centre for the ICT industry in South Africa,” added Alphonzo Samuels of Telkom Wholesale. “Other deregulated markets around the world have seen this happen too. It presents a neutral environment where carriers will be able to interconnect their networks, free from historic legacy issues."
Founded in 2007 and backed by leading international investors and Treacle Private Equity, a black owned South African private equity group, Teraco is a Level 4 contributor (DTI Codes). Teraco operates one Data Centre in Newlands, Cape Town and one Data Centre in Isando, Johannesburg (opening in Q4 2009) and will be expanding to other sites.
