Add to favorites UK MD Adriaan Oosthoek discusses cloud adoption, carrier neutrality and Marseille’s expansion.
Colo company Interxion "started with people wanting to do business with each other", said UK MD Adriaan Oosthoek.
CBR sat down with Oosthoek to talk about Interxion of today and how the data centre provider is preparing for the future.
CBR: How did Interxion start in the UK?
AO: Our industry actually started out from Telecoms D Regulation in the 90s, where alternative telecom operators wanted to locate their voice switches next to networks, next to BT. We were called Carrier Hotels: carriers that could connect to each other.
Then the internet happened and when you look at our business now, less than 1% of what happens in our data centre is still about voice, the rest is all about data. This is because they are the same carriers, they want to connect to each other with voice. They also want to interconnect with each other for data to transport "internet data". That is how these internet hubs started to be built, and data centres really are at the core of the development of the internet across the western world.
CBR: What is the importance of latency?
AO: Twenty years ago, it was all about the carriers interconnecting with each other, and they still do in our sites, but there are many more applications that need this interconnection in data centres than there was back then. Latency and speed of transactions is important.
If two customers are in the same data centre, latency is less than one millisecond, if one is here and the other one is in Slough it will be around three times longer. It is quite important that they are in the same data centre and we call that proximity hosting.
CBR: How do your data centres cope with the financial market customers?
AO: There is a bunch of meeting engines – the actual stock exchange, trading engines that receive and match the buy and sell orders – and they are in our data centre. People that actually want to transact on those exchanges are in our data centre as well.
These clients shoot in the transactions to buy and sell, and the matching engine matches those with orders coming from other people. The closer they are, the lower the latency, the bigger the chance of footfall being able to play in their favour. This will stop prices going up.
Often what we see is that they will have presence with Interxion and in Equinix’s Slough, and they will have redundant, resilient connections between the two locations.
CBR: How do you work with carriers in your hubs?
AO: With 39 data centres across Europe, even though we can connect them to each other’s, it is not our business to be a communications provider. Our customers do that.
We help our customers. We know the providers that live in our sites well and we also know what the good points are, what their strong goods are and we will help our customers sort out their network if they need it.
Carrying neutrality is a very important for us and we are truly neutral to whatever carrier that our customers want to use. We don’t favour one carrier over another and we want to have as many as possible, so our customers have many options to chose from, in order to organise their connectivity.
