{"id":14461,"date":"2012-06-07T01:56:16","date_gmt":"2012-06-06T23:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=14461"},"modified":"2012-11-14T16:11:26","modified_gmt":"2012-11-14T14:11:26","slug":"seacom-eyes-15-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/internet\/14461\/seacom-eyes-15-growth\/","title":{"rendered":"SEACOM eyes 15% growth"},"content":{"rendered":"

SEACOM<\/a>, 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In an interview with BusinessTech, Simpson said: \u201cThe 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\u2019s going to require us to reach into other markets, and to go deeper into the ones we are already in,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d he said. \u201cWe would like to be a player in this space\u201d.<\/p>\n

Simpson said that a shared revenue\/shared risk model in Africa would open up far more business for the group.<\/p>\n

SEACOM boasts over 17,000km of undersea fibre optic cable, connecting Africa to the rest of the world via India and Europe.<\/p>\n

The company chief said that Seacom’s submarine fibre-optic network would be upgraded as part of an investment programme for 2012.<\/p>\n

Simpson says the group will trial 40Gbps, and moving up to 100Gbps terminal equipment, from its current 10Gbps transmission technology.<\/p>\n

The initial upgrade, from 10Gbps to 40Gbps, will see Seacom’s design capacity reach 2.56Tbps, from 1.28Tbps.<\/p>\n

A more resilient network<\/strong><\/p>\n

A cable break on the SEACOM\u00a0system meant that many South African broadband users may have experienced a slowdown in international speeds on Friday morning (25 May 2012).<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cRelatively speaking, the international network has been pretty stable,\u201d Simpson said.<\/p>\n

He pointed out that a lot of the group\u2019s terrestrial fibre consisted of a partnership. \u201cWe certainly have some quality issues there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Simpson was appointed CEO of SEACOM in September 2011, taking over from Brian\u00a0Herlihy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An industry veteran with more than 25 years\u2019 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\u00a0system between\u00a0the United States and Japan.<\/p>\n

He was also chief operating officer (COO) and chief technology officer (CTO) at Asia\u00a0Netcom\u00a0(now\u00a0Pacnet) and CEO of\u00a0C2C\u00a0Pte\u00a0Ltd, Asia’s then largest cable system.<\/p>\n

Related articles:<\/strong><\/p>\n

SEACOM downtime strikes again<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":2417,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9882],"tags":[345,26,3027,39,1623],"class_list":["post-14461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-cloud","tag-headline","tag-mark-simpson","tag-seacom","tag-subsea-cables"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14461"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14693,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14461\/revisions\/14693"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}