Exodus Communications Inc. and Nomura Research Institute Ltd. (NRI) today announced plans to open what they say will be Japan's largest Internet hosting and data center.
The data center will be housed in a 14,620 square meter facility in Tokyo's Yotsuya area that Exodus is buying from NRI, said Ellen Hancock, president and chief executive officer of Exodus at a press conference here this afternoon.
Like the company's other centers, the Tokyo center will provide a secure facility in which companies can house their Internet servers. Exodus will offer 24-hour monitoring services and customers will be able to enter the center and work on their systems as they wish, said Hancock.
It will provide direct connectivity with 38 Internet service providers in Japan and plans call for four 155M bit per second circuits to connect the Tokyo center with four Exodus centers in Santa Clara, California. Hancock also announced that Exodus within the next six months plans to provide 1G bit Ethernet connectivity at all its data centers worldwide, including the new Tokyo center.
For its part, NRI will help with marketing and promotion of the services and also offer Internet consulting, system integration and implementation, as well as business application development services.
The existing relationships that Exodus has in the U.S. with Sun Microsystems Inc. and Compaq Computer Corp., through which it can provide rapid deployment of Internet services, will be carried over to Japan with the local units of the same partners and Hewlett-Packard Japan Ltd. In addition, Microsoft Corp. will offer systems solutions support through NRI.
Exodus made its first moves in Japan, and Asia, with the acquisition of Global OnLine Japan Co. Ltd. (GOL) in late November last year. [See "Exodus Makes an Entry into Japan's ISP Market," Nov. 28, 1999]. The deal gave Exodus its first slice of the Asian Internet market and a base from which to expand in Japan. In addition to being one of Japan's largest independent Internet service providers, GOL was also a leading provider of Web hosting services.
Speaking at the press conference today, Hancock said the company is already eyeing an expansion into the rest of the region. Without disclosing the countries where Exodus is looking, she said, "there will be other countries in Asia that will be getting (Exodus) Internet data centers as we go through 2000."
In Japan, use of the Internet is just beginning to reach levels where the largest Web sites need a facility such as a data center to house their systems.
By moving into the market at this point, the company hopes it can grab an early lead and repeat the success it has had in the U.S. market. In North America around one third of the Web's largest sites house their servers in Exodus data centers, the company said.
Exodus Communications, in Santa Clara, California, can be found online at http://www.exodus.com/. Nomura Research Institute, in Tokyo, can be found online at http://www.nri.co.jp/.