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Innovation

Megaport signs Verizon, Fujitsu ANZ in worldwide expansion

Megaport has signed Verizon's digital media services arm as a customer, along with Fujitsu as a reseller within Australia.
Written by Corinne Reichert, Contributor

Australian elastic interconnection services provider Megaport has announced contracting Verizon Media Digital Services as a new customer in a "long-term" agreement in the Asia-Pacific region and the United States, along with Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand as a reseller of Megaport services in Australia.

Under the first deal, Verizon Media Digital Services will make use of Megaport's Internet Exchanges across Sydney, Melbourne, and Singapore, as well as the provider's Elastic Fabric solutions in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, Ashburn, and Dallas. It will also use Internet Exchanges in Europe and other areas in future.

The deal will enable Verizon to localise its traffic through a direct connection, improving the speed and reliability of its content-delivery network services for customers.

"Our long-term agreement with Megaport is a demonstration of our commitment to quality and performance through the continuous expansion of our content-delivery network," said Verizon Digital Media Services CTO Rob Peters.

"We're excited to work with Megaport to further develop our network, so that internet users can quickly and reliably access online content no matter where they are."

Megaport CEO Denver Maddux said the deal with Verizon would improve the value of its offering.

"The addition of Verizon Digital Media Services brings enormous value to our ecosystem," Maddux said.

"Content and ecommerce services exhibit similar network behaviour as cloud services where there is a need to move tremendous amounts of data between service regions and ecosystem partners. Plus, there is a need to localise traffic to ensure better performance to consumers."

Maddux told ZDNet the company's expansion efforts -- it planned to bring services to 31 North American locations by April 30 and 13 European locations, including London, Stockholm, Dublin, and Amsterdam, by June, and is planning to expand to more than 100 sites globally by the end of December 2016 -- are on track.

"We published that we would bring all North American sites into production by end of April 2016. That was accomplished," the CEO told ZDNet.

"We also said that we would finish our initial European build out by end of June 2016. That is under way and on target."

Megaport's global reseller agreement with Fujitsu, meanwhile, will see the latter provide its customers with hybrid on-demand cloud services including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services by reselling Megaport's services. Fujitsu customers will be able to order direct elastic connectivity via the Megaport portal or API.

"We are continually looking to add value to our customers by maximising the performance, reliability, security, and sustainability of our data offering," said Mike Foster, CEO of Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand.

"This partnership is the next step in our vision to meet the challenges of digital transformation and support our customers' needs in an increasingly hyper-connected world."

As part of the deal, Megaport will establish points of presence in Fujitsu's Perth and North Ryde, Sydney datacentres, with Fujitsu also becoming the first reseller of Megaport services in Western Australia.

"Our alliance enables us to address the need for scalable cloud services in Western Australia with real-time speed and greater optionality," Maddux commented.

"Having Fujitsu's managed services available across the Megaport Fabric provides great value to our global customers as they execute on their hybrid IT strategies."

In February, Megaport reported a AU$9.9 million loss on revenue of AU$1,001,079 for the six months ending December 2015, with the net loss incurred as a result of continuing to roll out its services worldwide.

Maddux pointed towards the revenue growth rather than net loss, with the company's December revenue standing at AU$220,543 -- 29 percent higher than in July 2015.

"We are pleased to report that the markets in Asia Pacific, specifically Australia, continue to grow and generate profit after direct network costs, in addition to strong market adoption gains with 31 percent revenue growth during this half-year," Maddux said at the time.

"The number of ports sold increased by 72 percent, and we are happy that Singapore and Hong Kong have shown continued improvement in revenue growth."

As of the end of December, Megaport extended across 46 locations, 504 ports, and 253 customers. The company had net assets of AU$28.36 million. It operated across 54 datacentres in 13 markets throughout Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United States.

Its cash position was AU$25.4 million at the end of the year, which Megaport said it would use to continue expanding across the US and Europe.

Megaport began trading on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in mid December after a successful Initial Public Offering (IPO) that saw it raise AU$25 million to be primarily used to expand services across the US and Europe.

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