Interxion Talks Cloud, European Market with TMCnet

Colocation leader Interxion (News - Alert) had a very specific mission while at Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., this week – to forge relationships with U.S. companies looking to export their platforms into the European market.

“The reason we are here is we are seeing a large interest in U.S. service providers who are looking at Europe as an opportunity,” Vincent Veld, director of marketing and business development for Interxion, told TMCnet Wednesday at Cloud Expo. “… We are here to talk to them and inform them and tell them the best approach for the European market.”

Interxion is a leading provider of colocation, data centers and managed services in Europe. The company owns and operates 61,000 m² of colocation space within 28 data centers in 11 countries across Europe.

While at Cloud Expo, which is taking place this week from Nov. 7-10, Interxion is shedding light on its latest announcement – the fact that this past summer Interxion and CoreSite Realty Corporation formed a cloud computing alliance which addresses demand from cloud companies looking to collocate in both European and the U.S. data centers. This alliance aims to reduce the risk and challenges associated with international data center sourcing between Europe and the U.S., providing a seamless sourcing process and cloud-optimized network access environment.

The alliance also offers a solution for latency problems.

“At a certain stage, latency becomes very important,” Jelle Frank van der Zwet, marketing manager at Interxion, told TMCnet at Cloud Expo in New York City a few months ago. “Cloud addresses the issues of latency.”

At Cloud Expo West this week, Interxion has been displaying its Cloud Testlabs, including Microsoft's (News - Alert) Dynamic Datacentre Toolkit (DCC), and the recently announced Cloud Testlab in the UK, based on Flexiant Extility. The Cloud Testlab allows cloud hosting providers and system integrators to develop cloud services and virtualized environments at high speed before deploying them in the cloud, allowing enterprises and service providers to build both private and public clouds at high speed and with best-in-class performance guarantees, according to company officials.

While at Cloud Expo, Interxion also took the time to weigh in on some important questions like where we are with the cloud and what challenges still face the industry.

According to Veld, service providers in particular are starting to view cloud as a good investment.

“No one can really predict and forecast what the size of the platform will look like in a year from now, but what they are relying on are data center providers like us who have a flexible and scalable environment,” he said. “What we do is create a very flexible contract where we allow those people to scale within our data center, and that’s at the heart of our strategy since 1998.”

Although service providers and enterprises have been starting to come around to cloud, particularly in the U.S., Veld said SMBs need to catch on to this trend especially since cloud stands to help that group the most.

“That’s where cloud delivery mechanisms can have the biggest impact because the IT knowledge and IT resources are very scarce,” he said.

So what’s next for Interxion?

“What we are building towards is we will position our data center truly as a solution center or a competency center for cloud computing,” Veld said. “We have already dubbed our data centers as cloud hubs which is a better way of explaining what these data centers do.”

“By being in our data center and be able to connect and interconnect with delivery models, it allows the enterprise to build hybrid solutions,” he added.