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Reliance Globalcom has changed its name to Global Cloud Xchange, a move that coincides with its plan to deliver the world’s “first true cloud ecosystem globally.”
The company, which has vast brand recognition in India and other parts of Asia, currently has network operating centers in Mumbai and Denver. It controls the world’s largest privately owned sub-sea cable system, has fiber assets that reach 85 percent of the world’s population, counts 74 of the Fortune 500 companies as customers, and is the largest and fastest-growing fiber operator in emerging markets.
CEO Bill Barney, at a New York City press event March 18, said that consumers have driven the next generation of Internet services and that everything is going into the cloud, where every kind of company around the work has realized it can cut IT costs.
Global Cloud Xchange will build more and smarter data centers, integrate its key international assets with a focus on IP and cloud services, and play at the center of the next-generation Internet, which Barney called a triumvirate of mobile, search and social.
“I’ve watched the mobile guys be exciting,” said Barney. “The good news is the fiber guys are going to be exciting.”
The industry has already grown from 10G bps to 100G bps, and there’s a “clear path” to 1,000G bps, the company said in presented materials, adding that distributed data centers will become the norm and fiber will become “vogue again.”
“We’re going to expand our submarine cables. We’re going to get bigger, stronger, faster. … We used to build our [cables] to the shore ends. Going forward, we’re going to build to the cities,” Barney continued. “We will be the leader of the software-defined networks.”
Over the next 12 months, the company plans to launch more than 20 Cloud Exchanges that will “move the digital universe of the enterprise into the cloud.”
It will drop these cloud exchanges into what it calls Forward Operating Centers (FOCs): high-density data centers with “strong fiber connectivity and Internet gravity” that are located in cities and tech centers where they can have high customer engagement and growth to generate 80 to 90 percent of their cash from services.
The company’s roadmap from there includes accelerating global connectivity between 2014 and 2016 by enhancing the fiber connectivity under the cloud exchange and shifting its largest enterprise and carrier partners into the “fiber-connected universe of the cloud.”
“We’re going to work the [digital] trading routes, one of the biggest of which is India to the Silicon Valley,” said Barney. Another is New York to Asia. “These are the key places we think are underserved.”
Getting more specific, Barney said that Google and Amazon have been partners in the past, but that at certain levels they’ll begin to compete.
“Amazon is only one option, and there has to be other options,” said Barney. While this may mean quite a fight in the United States, Global Cloud Xchange has the advantage of already having a footprint in such underserved markets as Saudi Arabia and India.
“In the beginning we’ll be a facilitator, but eventually we’ll be a cloud operator in its own right,” said Barney.
Warming to his topic, Barney said he’d just come off of a sabbatical that he spent investigating where the next major technologies will come from. The next 10 years, he said, will bring changes like the world has never seen.
Barney smiled, “We’re going to want to fasten our seatbelts.”