The world's largest Internet Service Provider has launched its much-awaited assault on the Australian corporate market, with plans to build a multi-million dollar data centre also on the table.
UUNET, which owns the mostly consumer-focused OzEmail, has opted to use the local ISP's Sydney headquarters as its regional operations centre for the Asia Pacific, as part of its ambitious global expansion plans.
"We managed to persuade the US board that this was the place to build the regional operations centre with customer support for Asia Pacific in four languages, English, Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese, supported on the third floor," UUNET's Australian MD and CEO of OzEmail David Spence said.
A subsidiary of US giant MCI WorldCom, UUNET already has more than 70,000 business customers in 19 countries and provides the infrastructure for the networks of AOL and MSN.
The company has a growth rate of more than 60 percent and has established operations in Hong Kong, Tokyo and to a limited extent in Singapore, according to Peter Van Camp, President of Internet Markets for UUNET.
The local operation will start rolling out UUNET products immediately, targeting corporate customers. "We are different from Telstra and Optus because we have this global footprint in place today so business only has to look to one place," Van Camp said.
"OzEmail had a lot of corporate services but not at the robust level we will roll out now," Spence said.
"Sean (Howard, OzEmail's founder) and I found in the old days it was harder and harder to scale and we were losing business. UUNET knows how to scale to meet demand."
OzEmail will migrate existing corporate clients onto a new UUNet network under construction. The exercise costs roughly $55-60 million to bring up the new network alongside the old, which is valued at about $28 million. OzEmail has spent $80 million in Australia in the last year to buy new capacity.
UUNET and OzEmail executives said they believed the sheer size and connectivity possesed by the UUNET network will now weigh in their favour at the negotiation table with Telstra, particularly on the issue of inter-network transit charges.
David Spence has also presented to the board of UUNET "a business case to put a substantial data centre in Australia, but it has not been approved yet".
Such as centre would cost "in excess of $10 million to put down the base infrastructure."
"I had spoken to EDS (about using the company's South Australian hosting facility), but that was before in received the UUNET specifications. And they (UUNET) will only do it if they can get 100 percent ownership."
Spence said it was more likely a data centre would be built from scratch in Sydney or Melbourne.
"We see extensive hosting opportunities. UUNet has a $100 million contract to build out a data centre in the US," Van Camp said.
UUNET's plans for global expansion include deploying operations in as many as 42 countries, which would occupy about 95 percent of the global Internet space, according to Van Camp.
"We will continue to look for opportunities because we want to be the global leader in Internet connectivity. Around the world today we are investing US$2 million every day in the expansion of capacity in these networks. We are actually doubling capacity every three to four months."
