Pihana launches US$20m data center in HK
Located in Hong Kong, the US$20 million center is said to complete Pihana's six-country rollout that began in October last year.
As with Pihana's facilities in Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Honolulu and the US, the 45,000 sq ft center will provide Internet exchange, co-location and other managed services to carriers, Internet service providers, application service providers, content providers and enterprises in the region.
Hutchison Global Crossing, New T&T, New World Telephone and PCCW HKT will be establishing fiber access nodes in the Hong Kong facility, the company said in a statement.
Since being founded in January 2000, Honolulu-headquartered Pihana has raised US$236 million in private equity from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Private Equity, UBS Capital, GE Capital Telecom, Hewlett-Packard and Columbia Capital, among others.
A significant proportion of that was expected to be spent on building its footprint in Asia Pacific, said CEO and president Richard Kalbrener in April. He was speaking at the launch of Pihana's US$35 million center in Singapore--the site of its regional headquarters and network operations center.
When asked how the company would compete with the increasing number of data centers coming online this year, Pihana chairman Lambert Onuma noted then that "unlike other data centers, Pihana does not re-sell bandwidth nor is it affiliated with any carrier or capacity provider...We're not in the business of selling 'real estate' (storage space)."
Instead, the company's revenue is expected to come mainly from its Internet exchanges (from port and interconnectivity charges, among others) as well as from value-added services such as managed services for storage and security, and professional services, said Kalbrener.
Kalbrener declined to provide revenue forecasts, but said the company hopes to breakeven in the latter half of 2002.