Long Road From Cuba: Manny Medina, CEO of Terremark (Part 4)

SM: Why did you make the decision to finish building NAP? It sounds as though, given the implosion in the industry, that staying with real estate would have been a better decision.

MM: I don’t believe that for a minute. Look at how we are doing today.

SM: Today is nine years later. I want to focus on the decision you made when you were in the middle of the turmoil.

MM: I just thought that we were building something extremely special that would be irreplaceable. I was already a firm believer in the power of the Internet, and I believed it would change our lives. I wanted to be a player in that process. I believed that owning the NAP of the Americas would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I believed that only the exchange point which linked an entire continent to the Internet would be valuable regardless of the market.

SM: You still own the NAP today. Is that the only one for South America?

MM: Today we also own one in São Paulo, Brazil. That one serves the southern areas. Our company has grown all over the world. NAP Americas was the signature project which gave us the reputation to continue building.

SM: In the network architecture of the telecom carriers that exist today, what other significant NAPs are there?

MM: There is one in Europe, one in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Virginia and other places. There are major hubs all over the world today. Our original hub connected Latin American and the Caribbean only with North America and Europe.

SM: How much of the Latin America to Europe/America do you carry?

MM: About 95% of the traffic between Latin American and North America. Europe divides between New York, Virginia, and Miami. There are only two points on the East Coast where these cable points land, here in Miami and in New Jersey.

SM: If al-Qaeda blew you guys up, we would be isolated and disconnected?

MM: Today it would not harm anything because everything is backed up everywhere else. There are backups in New York, Virginia, Dallas, and other places. We have redundancy points for our own hub and our customers have redundancy for theirs as well. The time for blowing up a hub and causing harm was in 2001, not today.

SM: In 2001 who were your competitors?

MM: We did not have a lot of them. The carriers competed a little bit because they had their own data centers. There is a regional component to data centers, because if you are catering to banks or law firms then their IT guys want to come in and touch the equipment themselves. A locality factor is still part of data centers.

SM: Is your primary customer base local banks?

MM: Originally it was carriers. In time we began selling to local customers such as banks and law firms. Then we began selling to the federal government, and universities followed. It was local at the beginning.

SM: What is the distribution of business between local and non-local business today?

MM: Local business is very small. About 30% of our business is the federal government. We now have major campuses in Virginia, Silicon Valley, and Dallas.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Long Road From Cuba: Manny Medina, CEO of Terremark
1 2 3 4 5 6 7