DCS: How would you say the data centre market has evolved?

“I think that over the past few years providers in our sector have performed well in response to customer demand, and as a result the debate is moving on from operational excellence.

In today’s colocation market there are clearly still some players who cannot keep up – either they do not provide the power density that customers need, or their physical growth or standards implementation processes are too slow, or their service track record is poor. But as a whole I would say the industry has matured now and provides a clear set of core capabilities as standard.

I would define these core capabilities as physical and data security, a base level of connectivity choice, high-density power, and in-built redundancy and continuity - in other words guaranteed uptime.

In addition, to a lesser extent, I’d say that uniform energy-efficient design and operations and standards-based quality systems are now becoming the norm rather than the exception. 

At Interxion, for instance, we have worked hard with industry associations such as The Green Grid and The Uptime Institute and regulators such as the European Commission Joint Research Centre on Sustainability to define working energy-efficiency metrics.

With the launch of the voluntary European Code of Conduct we are now seeing significant progress across the industry in this area. 

On the quality systems side, our pan-European ISO 27001 accreditation for Information Security Management Systems has been a part of our offer for quite some time now, so to maintain our edge we have recently gained accreditation for the BS25999 Business Continuity Management standard, which we have embedded in the ISO 27001 systems.

As a leading service provider we believe these capabilities are vital, and we are constantly working to extend and improve them, but in today’s sophisticated and fast-changing marketplace we want to offer greater value in the data centre to make us as attractive as possible for customers - we need to offer ready-made super-connected communities.”

DCS: What is a super-connected community and how does it generate value?

“A super-connected community is one in which our customers’ suppliers, service providers, partners, customers and prospects are all quickly and easily accessible under one roof with low-latency connectivity to strategic end-points outside the data centre. Because of their proximity, or more specifically, the proximity of their data, customers derive more value from existing relationships, build new relationships, and generate new value and new revenue.

In the outside world it is difficult to find an analogy that explains this easily, as the level of proximity we are talking about does not exist, but these communities operate a bit like the marketplaces around which cities grew up, where choice drives competition leading to efficiencies, innovation, and prosperity.”

DCS: Could you give an example of a community?

“Certainly. Let’s take the financial services community, which is particularly vibrant and fast-moving.   Because Interxion operates physically at the heart of Europe’s capital markets in the City of London, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Paris, Madrid and Zurich, we have a large number of customers in this sector who achieve significant reductions in both latency and cost by colocating with us. We even host the matching engines and PoPs of key trading venues. This attracts leading high-frequency traders who, in turn, act as magnet for customers others in the sector.

To meet the needs of these customers and grow the community, we developed Financial Hubs, located in key financial centres across Europe, which are physical spaces within our data centres where the financial community can come together and interconnect at low latency and low cost using cross connects to link with the key market participants they need in order to to build their trading and market data networks.

This super-connected community has grown at remarkable speed, delivering value in every direction. Besides specialist financial network service providers, the community includes specialist technology partners, such as order routing networks, Smart Order Routers, risk management, direct-feed handling and infrastructure management service providers.

Customers of all types can enhance existing processes, manage costs better and generate new revenue streams through interaction with the rest of the community.

Other communities that have grown to a critical mass in our data centres include the carrier community, which is the largest of any data centre operator in in Europe. And the digital media community, who are increasingly interested in our Content Hub offerings to maximise the efficiency of online content management and distribution. And of course there is also the cloud community which are housed in our Cloud Hub, where low latency, high bandwidth and robust cost-effective connections to end-users markest and partners are the tickets to success.”

DCS: How do you encourage the development of these communities?

“We have established dedicated partner programmes for our customer communities, where we provide advice to new customers on potential partners and service providers, assist with introductions and cross-selling opportunities and where necessary work with customers to develop the business case for new services and partnerships.

We also provide test facilities to encourage innovation, generally at no cost, and where applicable we offer SLAs that are tailored to the needs of a specific community.

At the heart of the community-based approach is the provision of dedicated sector-focused teams who are determin to understand the business needs of our customers, and of course, this is an ongoing process. But the more we find out, the more value we are able to deliver in the data centre, and the more compelling benefits emerge for our customers.”

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