Fibre wholesaler Vocus (ASX:VOC) has moved to position itself as a key capacity provider for US companies selling Cloud services to Australian customers via South East Asia.
The company has established a point of presence (PoP) at the Equinix data centre in Singapore, facilitated by its acquisition of capacity on the SeaMeWe-3 undersea cable system from Perth to Singapore several months ago.
Vocus chief executive, James Spenceley, told Computerworld Australia the international move would aim to provide overseas companies moving into Singapore with lower latency and a direct path in order to sell capacity back into Australia.
“Microsoft is a great example and we target customers like that for selling capacity back into Australia to feed their operations here,” Spenceley said. “We’ll also sell capacity from Australian companies who need better routes into South East Asia for things like VoIP and office to office communications which doesn’t benefit from going all the way to the US before it goes back to Japan and then down to Singapore.”
Microsoft was not alone in the launch of Verizon Business’ Cloud-based storage service in June 2010 which only had locations in North America, Germany and Japan for customers to store data.
The launch of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in April 2010 also had the company acknowledging the potential struggle it would face in attracting public sector and some private sector customers as it had no plans for an Australia-based data centre.
“There is no doubt that there will be some customers who will not use our Web services until we have a data centre presence in Australia and those customers will wait before they leverage our services,” AWS head and senior vice president, Andy Jassy, said at the time.
“We have a number of Australian customers who have been using Web services out of our US data centres and there will be a lot of workloads and customers who will find being able to use the resources available in Singapore will be much better.”
According to Spenceley, the move overseas has been “a huge focus” for some time following the companies foray into New Zealand more than two years ago, which he said generates about 30 per cent of Vocus’ revenue.
“We got some experience operating overseas business and dealing with foreign exchange issues and things like setting up remote equipment and then we really spent the remaining time trying to get together both the customer requirement and also capacity on the direct cable system there.
“More and more content is coming out of Asia whereas all the big fat pipes have typically gone east to the US as that’s been the source of most of the content but people want better performance into Singapore and also Hong Kong for call centres."
In the future, Spenceley said the PoP in Singapore would facilitate the establishment of more PoPs, with Hong Kong “something of interest” and Japan “high on the target list.”
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