Telecommunications provider Pacnet aspires to become the third largest data centre operator in Asia Pacific by 2019, a goal which the company's chief executive, Bill Barney, says is a step closer following recent operations in Sydney.
According to Barney, the telco didn't own any data centre infrastructure until late 2010 when it opened facilities in Hong Kong and Singapore, which combined with its Sydney operations make it the eighth largest data centre operator in the Asia Pacific region.
The new Sydney data centre is located in a refurbished facility in Liverpool Street as it shifts operations from a leased centre in Bond Street.
It also leases 100,000 square feet of data centres in the Asia Pacific region but slowly, Barney says, plans to turn these into company owned sites as well.
The first phase of the Sydney data centre covers 5,920 square feet and when completed will scale up to 41,700 square feet.
Barney said the move was also motivated by lack of space in its old facility and the growing amount of digital content, such as video, being generated.
"If you look at where we've gone in the video space in the last few years, things have changed dramatically," he said. "It's only a matter of time before Facebook becomes all about video, not photos."
Pacnet is also aiming to target the public and private Cloud computing areas.
"When I talk about Cloud computing, it's all about using software in a shared environment. In the short term there is a huge opportunity for companies like us to play in that space," he said.
"We're focused on the SME market because there is less IT personnel or infrastructure in that space. I believe SME will be the fastest growing portion of the Cloud space in the next two to five years [as a result of this]," he said.
In addition to playing in the data centre space, Pacnet is also in the submarine cable business, owning 60 per cent of the undersea cable assets in Asia with plans to build a fibre optic cable with Pacific Fibre to will span the US, Australia and New Zealand.
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