Posted: 01/2001
Offers Change Hubs into Trading Centers
By Khali Henderson
Neutral collocation facility operators are moving beyond real estate and access management to provide services that will facilitate city-to-city and metro capacity trading.
Telx (www.telx.com), which has operated a neutral collocation facility at 60 Hudson St. in New York for the past three years, is adding what it calls an Intelligent Facility Management System by installing an intelligent optical cross-connect technology from an undisclosed vendor. The switch will let telx intelligently manage cross-connects for the more than 100 network service providers in its facility, says Hunter Newby, executive vice president of strategic planning for telx.
"Right now, they [carrier] order cross-connects to each other and we provision them. That's going on every day. All we are doing now is putting intelligence in the middle ... no more manual cross-connects."
The process is managed remotely by computer as the carriers are pre-connected to the switch. This "view," will be accessible by telx carrier customers as well, he says.
The benefits are "within minutes" connections and quality of service monitoring. Of the former, Newby, says its value to carriers is negligible since most are unable to bill in increments less than 30 days. The ability to monitor QoS is "tremendously important," he says, in enabling true commoditized trading of bandwidth. The reason, he says, is that without the ability to determine QoS, you cannot determine non-performance and associated liquidated damages. "Without liquidated damages, there can't be a trading environment like you have in energy," he says.
Newby says telx will not facilitate trades between carriers via brokering or web-based trading floor. It's not that he doesn't think it's a vital service, but telx already is home to providers such as Band-X Inc. (www.band-x.com) and The Global Telexchange Inc. (www.thegtx.com), which offer such services.
Neutral collocation provider Equinix Inc. (www.equinix.com), has decided to take that next step, rolling out a new service for residents of its Internet Business Exchanges to facilitate buying and selling of products. The service called Equinix MATRIX (Marketplace and Transactions Internet eXchange) enables IBX participants to research, evaluate and negotiate services from multiple providers through a browser-based platform and with the assistance of dedicated Equinix staff.
Sellers can use MATRIX to provide real-time electronic catalogs of service offerings, selectively target information to buyers, publish promotion, respond to RFPs and negotiate deals. Buyers can search and find vendors, create and manage RFPs and negotiate deals.
Steve Reichgut, director of product marketing for Equinix, says that unlike other buyer-seller matching services tendered by online exchanges, MATRIX does not foster anonymity nor does Equinix take a commission. The service, is intended to facilitate and automate discussion and negotiation between participants in the exchange.
By provisioning a $20,000 circuit, for example, in two days rather than six weeks, the provider stands to improve his top line by $30,000, says Reichgut, explainingt benefits of the MATRIX/IBX combination.
"[MATRIX] is a complement to our business model," says Equinix customer Sean Whelan, vice president of strategic alliances for Telseon, a metro gigabit IP wholesaler. "Telseon is all about facilitating on-demand transactions."
