Case Par7, datacenter in Marseille, prices and shortages of electricity and concentration in the market for data centers, Fabrice Coquio, Managing Director Interxion France gave an update on the news of the company and the industry in turmoil.
Year funny to Interxion, a married time with TelecityGroup, it marries with Equinix. In France, the residents of La Courneuve are complaints datacenter noise Par7 and win the first set. Fabrice Coquio returns for Silicon.fr on these various events.
Silicon.fr: news Interxion saw a court case where local residents claiming to mind the noise attacked a data center operating permit in La Courneuve. What are your feelings on this?
Fabrice Coquio: Without commenting on the court decision, the case is serious. Not just for us, because it relates to any listed property, which is 500 000 sites in France. The Ministry of Environment and Interxion have decided to appeal. But as the appeal is not suspensive, we obtained a provisional authorization of the Prefecture and we will make a new impact study to show the absence of noise pollution and risk.
Is this type of case will change the way you work?
This example will be a lesson to dialogue and have more education with local residents. For Par7 in La Courneuve, we organized the presentation meetings, show models. But will certainly do more to reassure and understand people's perception of these nuisances. Especially since the next data centers will always be bigger, more powerful and built in an urban environment.
Returning to Interxion, how is society?
We presented the results of the 3 rd quarter with global growth of around 13% of revenues and EBITDA.We confirmed the ambition to reach 325 million euros in revenues in 2015. In France, the year 2015 is expected to experience higher growth figures worldwide. We have become the engine of the group.
How to explain this performance?
It is largely due to the opening of our datacenter in Marseille [[note: Interxion bought a datacenter SFR in August 2014]. Without Marseille, we would have a growth of 6 to 7%. More and more operators settled in Marseille. NTT DoCoMo eg IP network extended its heart in Marseille. This opens markets such as Southern Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Why the attraction to Marseille?
The city has 3 advantages that make it a rising value of digital. The first is a question of cost, to settle in Marseille cheaper than Paris, Amsterdam and London. Second, the available bandwidth has become very important with a total of 103 Tbits available through submarine cables. This overcapacity brings a third advantage: a time of reduced latency. Today, between Marseille and Casablanca or Cairo, one arrives at 5 ms, while a Paris-Marseille, the latency of an estimated 7 to 8 ms.
Is this enough to attract foreign and French clients?
Since the acquisition of the data center of Marseille, several customers have trusted us, China Telecom, PCW, but also the CDN as Akamai, Limelight and CloudFlare. Marseille has grown from a city of transit to a content city. Large companies are also interested in Marseille with the development of hybrid cloud.Banks or industrial that go to the public cloud need to have a low latency.
The large IT operators looking to expand their regional plates like Microsoft and AWS. France had been completely bypassed by American actors, but today there is an awareness for those who have the stock.Marseille can meet their requirements. The next step will probably be the creation of "Compute Nodes" in the region with data centers equipped with 6-8000 m² rooms and a capacity from October to December MWatts.
Where do you stand on the issues of cost of electricity?
On the issue of cost, the NOME law provides for the end of the regulated tariff from 1 st January 2016. All the data center players have agreements in 2016-2017. Tenders were passed and we chose Schneider Summit Energy and EDF for carbon offsetting as we réinjectons energy datacenters in the EDF network.The electricity bill includes a section for the supply (approximately 60%), but also including taxes CSPE (Contribution to the electricity utility). According to a note of EDF, the CSPE will increase by 10-15% per year, a very significant inflation. Interxion will be impacted, but for 2016 we keep the same price level for our customers.
And the chronic shortage of electricity in the north of Paris, where are we?
The situation is indeed very tense and is likely to 2020 Saint Ouen up Pantin. ERDF has made investment plans with the opening of positions in Aubervilliers, Montreuil and Saint-Denis Pleyel. This is part of the creation of the Grand Paris and infrastructure development.
The market for data centers is now moving with industry consolidation. How Interxion positions?
As you could see, we were in a merger process with Telecity Group Equinix and finally made a takeover bid for Telecity Group. This transaction is awaiting approval from the European Commission [Editor's note from the interview, Brussels has validated the requirement for acquisition with Equinix data centers to resell some in Amsterdam, London and Frankfurt]. These operations have several motives such as changing the wholesale model to go to the retail or as Interxion Telehouse.
There is also a phenomenon of market share acquisition and critical size, the data center industry invests 50-60% of its turnover. So there is a logic to lower the cost of capital. Especially that the regions will be growing in the next 3-4 years, South America, North Africa, etc. Finally, last item, US customers have deployment plans of tens of millions of dollars in the next 2-3 years.
Fabrice Coquio Interxion: "Strong growth thanks to the Marseille data center”
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Monday, May 30, 2016