The move to build or acquire data centers by larger regional and national telecom carriers is well documented. Data centers enable a new range of services and applications that carriers can bring to small, medium, and enterprise business customers, creating a new engine of growth.
Two smaller independent carriers, ITS Telecom of Indiantown, Florida and Twin Valley Telephone of Miltonvale, Kansas have embarked on data center strategies of their own, which although smaller in scale than their larger regional and national brethren, mirror their revenue diversification approach. Listen to the details of their data center strategy in the below video interviews.
ITS Telecom CEO Jeff Leslie discusses their decision to build a data center from scratch and outlines the many opportunities it now brings their company.
Twin Valley Telephone Director of Sales and Marketing Eric Tabor discusses Twin Valley Telephone’s decision to acquire a data center, which they have since expanded into additional markets.
Some organization should be working on a confederation of some sorts for all of these independent data centers, so we can get a national footprint of data centers to match the capabilities of the large national players. That would greatly expand the large enterprise opportunity.
If I recall correctly, that has been tried before with not much success. Maybe it was just too early and timing is better now.
Larry, you are correct. This seems like it would be a logical step for Indatel, given that their relations with the regional networks.
I would like to see Indatel get access to more ethernet carriers, including the last mile, for the statewide networks so we could serve businesses more easily. Once this happened, I think it would open the door for a lot of operators to begin to look at this model.
For the most part, I'm bullish on the cloud. I do think it's role in our business will be critical for long term success (at least until the next trend comes along that makes the cloud obsolete). But I do find the following quite ironic. All of our video coverage of the Cloud Services Summit is hosted in the cloud with blip.tv. They have a data center in the New York city area, which as we all know, has been devastated by "Superstorm Sandy."
They notified their customers recently with the following statement – "A generator at one of our datacenters failed at approx 9:20am ET on 11/1 due to damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in New York City. The site is up, but videos are down. Please check http://twitter.com/blip for updates throughout the day. "
We weren't impacted that much from what I can tell. But it does highlight that while the cloud is a critical part of our future, it's not without its challenges, and there are important lessons still to be learned.
We would be interested in being a part of a "Confederation of Data Centers" as the Minnesota location. We have a Data Center in the Carrier Hotel in Minneapolis with connectivity to almost any provider in Minnesota. Please contact me if interested in partnering. Jim Hickle jim.hickle@velocitytelephone.com
Doesn't the "confederation" already exist? It's called Indatel.