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Megaport elastic cloud services now live in 15 US regions

Megaport has announced going live in 15 US regions, and has also signed a deal with US enterprise datacentre provider CyrusOne to expand to additional areas.
Written by Corinne Reichert, Contributor

Australian interconnection services provider Megaport has completed the installation of 15 services across the United States, with its services now live in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Dallas, Northern Virginia, and Seattle metropolitan areas.

As part of what it called its "first-phase core footprint" for the US, new and existing customers in these regions have immediate connectivity to Megaport's multiple cloud and network service partners, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.

Megaport's US subsidiary has also signed a deal that will see the company's US footprint expand almost immediately, with Megaport partnering up with enterprise datacentre provider CyrusOne to provide software-defined networking (SDN)-enabled elastic interconnection and cloud services to customers using CyrusOne's existing US datacentres.

"We are excited to facilitate this ground-breaking agreement with Megaport," said CyrusOne CEO and president Gary Wojtaszek.

"The ability to leverage CyrusOne's National IX [internet exchange] platform and extensive datacentre footprint as an enabler and on-ramp to Megaport's cloud providers creates the perfect cloud connectivity solution for our customers."

CyrusOne has datacentres across 30 locations in the world, with its US facilities present in Chicago, Austin, Dallas, Cincinnati, Houston, Phoenix, Sterling, Florence, South Bend, Stamford, Norwalk, Wappingers Falls, Totowa, and San Antonio.

The deal will see Megaport enable CyrusOne's more than 925 customers with more capacity and scalability, as well as provide them with access to several service providers and clouds through Megaport's API, mobile apps, and "Megaportal".

It will see Megaport gain access to 13 more US locations.

"CyrusOne's US datacentre portfolio complements our neutral interconnection fabric extremely well, and rapidly expands our footprint in the United States," said Megaport CEO Denver Maddux.

The news of Megaport's continuing expansion across the US follows Megaport last week announcing that it had signed a deal with non-profit company Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) to exclusively provide services to AMS-IX customers worldwide.

The deal, also secured by Megaport's US subsidiary, will see it provide elastic multi-cloud connectivity to AMS-IX customers in Hong Kong, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Chicago.

Megaport began trading on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in mid-December after a successful Initial Public Offering (IPO) in November that saw it raise AU$25 million to be primarily used to expand services across the US and Europe.

Founded in 2013 by Australian technology entrepreneur Bevan Slattery, Megaport initially operated in the dark fibre business. It then spun off its dark fibre assets to found a separate company called Superloop, so that it could focus solely on expanding its layer 2 elastic connectivity platform outside of Asia and Australia.

"Rather than enterprises needing to purchase long-term, fixed bandwidth circuits between datacentres and their cloud providers, Megaport has developed a platform that uses software-defined networking to enable our customers to provision secure, dedicated, and highly scalable circuits otherwise known as 'elastic interconnects' between their network and other networks connected to the Megaport fabric," Slattery said at the time.

"With Megaport, customers can provision elastic interconnects for as long as a year and as short as one day, as slow as 1 megabit per second or as fast as 100 gigabits per second."

Slattery told ZDNet last year that it was important to divide Superloop and Megaport as the latter looks at growing beyond the APAC region.

"We looked at Megaport and where its rollout expansion was, and it was beyond those markets. I wanted to be very clear about what Megaport does and what it doesn't do. Megaport is a layer 2 elastic connectivity platform. It's about making it easier for the network and cloud guys to interconnect," he said.

"I didn't want people to also think it was a dark fibre provider."

Maddux had first flagged in October 2015 that Megaport would be looking at opportunities in the US and Europe.

"There's a lot of interest in Europe for the Megaport model, as well as the major cities in the US, where we may have some competition on features but not in terms of the overall capabilities of the platform," Maddux said.

Megaport, which trades under the ticker symbol MP1, aims to expand its business into 45 datacentres across Europe and North America in 2016.

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