Telstra’s regional data centre JV within Reach
By Michael Sainsbury, iTnews
Thursday, 26 July 2001
Telstra has dumped its planned Internet Data Centre (IDC) joint venture with Asian partner Pacific Century Cyberworks and instead will roll the business into Reach, the companies’ 50/50 IP backbone venture.
At a briefing on Telstra’s international business Thursday, the carrier’s international chief Dick Simpson said of the switch: “ We looked at the values and compared business cases and decided it would be better incorporated into Reach. We did that after having done the requisite amount of work that we said we would.”
The IDC joint venture was to be the third plank in the $5 billion alliance between the telco partners, after Reach and the regional wireless joint venture which currently only contains CSL - the former Hong Kong Telecom mobile business.
Reach boss Alistair Grieve said: “We have a number of data centres and they are rather good data centres. It makes no sense for another JV to replicate this around the region.”
He added that Reach’s IDCs were not as big as other data centres around the region that were having problems selling their capacity.
Grieve said Reach had data centres in Seoul, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Jakarta, Dehli and Bombay. He added that the company did not have a data centre in Japan but that there was a huge capacity in Asia’ biggest market.
“I don’t think any other organisation has IDCs in all those places,” Grieve said.
Meanwhile, Telstra boss Ziggy Switkowksi said that Telstra was about one third of the way to achieving its goal of having 20 percent to 25 percent of the company’s value coming from Asia within five years. Currently, the Asian joint ventures are worth about 6 percent to 8 percent of Telstra’s EBITDA, Switkowksi said. He added that the company was comfortable with the investment although IPOs of either of its JVs with PCCW were off the agenda for the time being. |
