The man responsible for bringing the data center craze to Latin America is Scott Puritz.
Co-founder of Diveo, a company that pioneered last-mile broadband south of the Rio Grande, Puritz felt the time was right to utilize the data center opportunity in the region, since no one was building U.S.-style data centers in some of the worlds hottest telecom markets such as Brazil and Mexico.
Thus, Puritz launched his own company, OptiGlobe Communications, with a mandate to build and operate Web hosting and colocation facilities in the region. The first data center opened in Sao Paulo, Brazil, is off to a screaming success, amassing 55 customers in just two and a half months of operations.
Puritz proudly says there is no other facility like that south of the U.S. A 159,000-square-foot data center, it already has 17 carriers such as Telefonica and Teleglobe selling their services inside. The clientele that OptiGlobe was able to attract is telling: 85 percent of its clients are businesses. One customer, a bank, started out by moving its back-end servers to OptiGlobe.
The plan is to expand in existing markets and move to other Latin American hot spots. A data center is under construction in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and field offices have already opened in Argentina, Chile and Mexico. OptiGlobe plans to build data centers in 13 major cities by 2002.
An entrepreneur, investor, consultant and executive, Puritz was president of the TC Group — a management consulting firm in the international communications sector — before plunging into the Latin data telecommunication business.