Megaport inks deal with Amsterdam Internet Exchange

Elastic interconnection services provider Megaport has announced signing a new deal with non-profit company Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) to exclusively provide services to AMS-IX customers worldwide.

The deal, made with Megaport's United States subsidiary, will see the Australian company provide its elastic multi-cloud connectivity to AMS-IX customers. The Amsterdam-headquartered internet exchange has customer bases in the Netherlands, the Caribbean, New York, Hong Kong, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Chicago. AMS-IX and Megaport will initially offer their services to each other's customers living in the latter three areas.

According to Megaport, the deal also "addresses industry fragmentation of internet peering services by connecting the two companies' fabrics to create greater reach to key peering locations".

"AMS-IX has a long history of building critical mass of peering partners on their internet exchanges," said Megaport CEO Denver Maddux.

"They operate one of the largest internet exchanges in the world. Connecting the AMS-IX and Megaport fabrics creates greater opportunity for internet peers to reach desired content, cloud services, and end-user networks."

AMS-IX CEO Job Witteman added that each will expand the others' footprint, with Megaport providing end-to-end network connections through 34 datacentres across Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, and Hong Kong to business customers.

"Building on Megaport's drive to deliver elastic connectivity globally, AMS-IX is excited to partner and expand our independent and distributed peering model as well as boosting the AMS-IX brand globally," Witteman said.

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

"This milestone allows Megaport to accelerate our business plans, to extend the platform deeper into existing markets, and to expand into new markets, including markets within North America, Europe, and Asia," Maddux said at the time.

Megaport was founded in 2013 by Australian technology entrepreneur Bevan Slattery. Initially operating in the dark fibre business, it spun off its dark fibre assets to found separate company Superloop, so that it could focus solely on expanding its layer 2 elastic connectivity platform outside of Asia and Australia.

"Rather than enterprises needing to purchase long-term, fixed bandwidth circuits between datacentres and their cloud providers, Megaport has developed a platform that uses software-defined networking (SDN) to enable our customers to provision secure, dedicated, and highly scalable circuits otherwise known as 'elastic interconnects' between their network and other networks connected to the Megaport fabric," said Slattery.

"With Megaport, customers can provision elastic interconnects for as long as a year and as short as one day, as slow as 1 megabit per second or as fast as 100 gigabits per second."

Slattery told ZDNet last year that it was important to divide Superloop and Megaport as the latter looks at growing beyond the APAC region.

"We looked at Megaport and where its rollout expansion was, and it was beyond those markets. I wanted to be very clear about what Megaport does and what it doesn't do. Megaport is a layer 2 elastic connectivity platform. It's about making it easier for the network and cloud guys to interconnect," he said.

"I didn't want people to also think it was a dark fibre provider."

Maddux had first flagged in October last year that Megaport would be looking at opportunities in the US and Europe.

"There's a lot of interest in Europe for the Megaport model, as well as the major cities in the US, where we may have some competition on features but not in terms of the overall capabilities of the platform," Maddux said.

Megaport, which trades under the ticker symbol MP1, is an Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, and Google Cloud Interconnection partner and aims to expand its business into 45 datacentres across Europe and North America in 2016.