Teraco Data Environments, a provider of colocation data centres, says it has increased its floor space to 5,400 square metres in the two years since the launch of its data centre in Isando, Johannesburg.<\/p>\n
Lex van Wyk, MD and co-founder of Teraco puts commercial space in South Africa at approximately 36,000 square metres, with major ICT operators like Internet Solutions and Telkom providing the lion\u2019s share.<\/p>\n
Since its inception in 2008, Teraco has grown to include three state-of-the-art co-location data centres in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg.<\/p>\n
According to van Wyk, the group has already sold 1,500 square metres out of 3,800 square metres available in Johannesburg – and in Durban, 900 square metres is still available out of an approximate total of 1,000 square metres available.<\/p>\n
In Cape Town, the group is close to capacity at its 500 square metre facility.<\/p>\n
In mid-2011, Teraco announced the completion of a R158 million \u2018Series C\u2019 financing for further expansion.<\/p>\n
Teraco chief financial officer, Jan Hnizdo said that financing has largely been deployed. The aim would now be to sell the capacity it has available, before reassessing its financial position.<\/p>\n
According to Hnizdo, Teraco is ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) \u201cbreak even\u201d.<\/p>\n
When questioned over a time frame to return a profit, both Hnizdo and van Wyk said that returns on the group would take time.<\/p>\n
In its most recent financing, the IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, became an equity shareholder in Teraco, while all of the company\u2019s current investors also participated in the financing, including Treacle Private Equity, Pentangle Group and Marlow Capital.<\/p>\n
NAPAfrica<\/strong><\/p>\n Van Wyk attributed the growth of the business to the availability of choice in carrier, network and service provider.<\/p>\n \u201cThis year alone we launched the first free and public peering service, NAPAfrica, as well as the African Cloud eXchange (ACX), a colocation space for sharing and selling cloud services,\u201d said van Wyk.<\/p>\n Free peering service, NAPAfrica launched in March 2012 with an initial exchange of 64Mbps. In the five months since launch, Teraco says NAPAfrica is already reaching volumes over 700Mbps.<\/p>\n In addition, the service has seen its initial 16 members swell to over 40 with no sign of slowing down.<\/p>\n \u201cMulti-lateral peering is unique to NAPAfrica in South Africa and allows for partners to interconnect freely, reducing costs for ISPs and their clients, and increasing network redundancy and routing flexibility,\u201d the MD said.<\/p>\n Terco said that the African Cloud eXchange, a vendor neutral colocation space for the sharing and selling of cloud services, aims to establish South Africa as a central hub for international access providers and cloud services to support the rest of Africa.<\/p>\n \u201cThe facility is connected to all of the undersea cables offering a combined 28 landing points along the East and West coasts of the continent. In addition, Teraco boasts connectivity to all the major carriers operating in SA and several active cloud providers, which positions us as the obvious choice for cloud providers to colocate their service offering,\u201d van Wyk said.<\/p>\n Recent calculations show that the total submarine cable capacity into Sub-Saharan Africa currently stands at 2 Terabytes. Van Wyk said that the combined capacity of all three Teraco facilities is 23 Terabytes, taking into account capacity from international carriers, mobile carriers, local carriers and fibre infrastructure providers.<\/p>\n \u201cThe advantages of colocation includes reduced interconnect fees, the freedom to select the best access provider and easy connections to the numerous other clients housed in the data centre.\u201d<\/p>\n The combined impact of just NAPAfrica and the African Cloud eXchange positions us as leaders in the market, and we are excited to bring new and innovative products to different sectors in the near future,\u201d van Wyk concluded.<\/p>\n Related articles<\/strong><\/p>\n Teraco poised for strong growth<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Teraco reveals 2012 capex spend<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n