Cape Town, 19 February 2009 – Teraco opened South Africa’s first vendor neutral data centre in Cape Town this month. The South African telecommunications space was liberalized in November 2008, when local courts affirmed the right to self-provision.  Since then 533 electronic communications network services (ECNS) licenses have been awarded and multiple operators are building networks, providing the perfect environment for the vendor neutral data centre business model to succeed.

For the first time ever in South Africa, carriers, corporates, ISPs and IT service providers get unrestricted choice in what they do with their data, in a secure facility built to international best practices.

“The timing for this business is right,” says van Wyk. “A number of operators are building networks and need to interconnect. So now, companies can benefit from vendor neutral data centres that give them global best practice facilities, unrestricted choice and access to many players in the industry, under one roof,” says van Wyk.

To date, outsourced data centre facilities in South Africa have typically been offered by the Internet Service Providers, bundled with their Internet access or managed hosting services, or by the large IT outsourcing companies, bundled with outsourcing, systems integration or hosted application services.     

In contrast, Teraco limits its activities to only providing infrastructure and facilities to avoid all conflicts of interest. Teraco takes care of the practical side of data centre management such as infrastructure redundancy, climate control, guaranteed electrical power, security and protection and maintenance. 

Being vendor Neutral, Teraco promotes ‘multi-sourcing’ where clients can acquire their Internet, telecom and related services from various providers within the data centre.

“There is absolute focus on taking care of the physical space and honouring our quite punitive service level agreements,” says Lex van Wyk, managing director of Teraco Data Environments. “We remain neutral and offer customers the freedom of choice to purchase or sell products and services to whomever they wish.  You want to buy your connectivity from one company, Internet access from another, and then do back-ups with yet another that’s okay with us. It’s your business. We don’t ever compete with our customers. We just want to be sure that the data centre is perfectly in order. All the time.”

The Teraco Data Centre goes live with carrier connections from Neotel and FastNet in place, Vodacom Business and Telkom in the pipeline, and points of presence from leading ISPs such as WebAfrica.

Alphonzo Samuels from Telkom Wholesale says, "Telkom fully endorses the development of a carrier neutral data centre for the ICT industry in South Africa.  Other deregulated markets around the world have seen this happen too. It presents a neutral environment where carriers will be able to interconnect their networks, free from historic legacy issues."  Telkom is currently finalizing network interconnection and transmission services, which are expected to be available to customers within the Teraco data centre.