SEACOM eyes 15% growth
SEACOM, the ICT and privately owned subsea cable company has targeted 15% annual growth and will enter the cloud services sector to achieve that goal, according to its CEO, Mark Simpson.
In an interview with BusinessTech, Simpson said: “The business is strong financially. We are working on some more aggressive growth plans. Wed like to be growing in the 15% per annum range. It’s going to require us to reach into other markets, and to go deeper into the ones we are already in,” he said.
“We also want to push more into other areas in the ICT infrastructure market. We are incubating a wholesale cloud play. We think that some of the infrastructure services that cloud offers are very appropriate. Cloud offers and enormously scalable infrastructure,” he said. “We would like to be a player in this space”.
Simpson said that a shared revenue/shared risk model in Africa would open up far more business for the group.
SEACOM boasts over 17,000km of undersea fibre optic cable, connecting Africa to the rest of the world via India and Europe.
The company chief said that Seacom’s submarine fibre-optic network would be upgraded as part of an investment programme for 2012.
Simpson says the group will trial 40Gbps, and moving up to 100Gbps terminal equipment, from its current 10Gbps transmission technology.
The initial upgrade, from 10Gbps to 40Gbps, will see Seacom’s design capacity reach 2.56Tbps, from 1.28Tbps.
A more resilient network
A cable break on the SEACOM system meant that many South African broadband users may have experienced a slowdown in international speeds on Friday morning (25 May 2012).
“We had an outage on our core international network on the France side for a few hours the other morning (25 May). We are basically putting some more resilience into that network fairly quickly to address that and we will continue to do that.
“Relatively speaking, the international network has been pretty stable,” Simpson said.
He pointed out that a lot of the group’s terrestrial fibre consisted of a partnership. “We certainly have some quality issues there,” he said.
Simpson was appointed CEO of SEACOM in September 2011, taking over from Brian Herlihy.
An industry veteran with more than 25 years’ experience in the telecommunications industry, Simpson has held a number of senior international executive positions during his career, most recently as president and CEO of Pacific Crossing, a company operating a trans-Pacific cable system between the United States and Japan.
He was also chief operating officer (COO) and chief technology officer (CTO) at Asia Netcom (now Pacnet) and CEO of C2C Pte Ltd, Asia’s then largest cable system.
Related articles:
Loading ...