Megaport takes pole position in SDN interconnect market, analyst says

Megaport CEO Vincent English made quite the impression as a keynote speaker during a conference earlier this week, according to an analyst report.

English spoke during a keynote fireside chat at the Fourth Annual Cowen Communications Infrastructure Summit in Boulder, Colorado. A conference summary note from Cowen Equity Research described Megaport's success to date in the software-defined networking (SDN) interconnect market.

According to the report, Megaport was founded in Australia in 2013 with the goal of connecting its customers to cloud service providers, which then led it to build a physical network that it could overlay its software platform on. Megaport then struck deals with cloud service providers that allowed its customers to connect to multiple clouds within 60 seconds.

"More simply, Megaport allows its customers to virtually connect to multiple cloud providers without the customer needing to have a physical cloud presence in data centers where the cloud-on ramps live," the report states.

After going public on the Australian Stock Exchange three years ago, Megaport is currently in 225 locations around the world and is connected to 108 cloud ramps across the top seven cloud service providers. Megaport is now in 15 countries across three continents and has relationships with 300 providers and 68 third-party data center operators, according to the report.

According to its website, Megaport has cloud partnerships in place with Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud and Salesforce.

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"During our Communications Infrastructure Summit, an underlying theme across the various panels/presentations/workshops was that increased data consumption requires physical infrastructure to support it," according to the Cowen research note. "The development of this physical infrastructure has helped in part drive the adoption of cloud-based services such as AWS, Azure, and Salesforce by enterprises who are now looking to more cost effectively manage the applications they utilize for their businesses."

The report notes that enterprises are increasingly buying cloud services from multiple cloud providers based on the strength of each provider's offerings. For example, Salesforce would be a good option for customer relationship marketing while Azure is a good fit for Microsoft Office 365. Aside of the Fortune 100 companies that have deep pockets, most enterprises can't afford data center deployments in each of the data centers where cloud on-ramps are located.

"This is where Megaport comes in," according to the Cowen report. "Through Megaport’s SDN-based interconnection platform, enterprise customers no longer need to purchase data center capacity, cross connects and circuits in order to access the cloud on-ramps they need.

"The success of its offering, particularly within the U.S., is evident in its rapid expansion into 101 locations today versus only 20 locations 18 months ago, as the company jockeys for pole position in the SDN-interconnect market and as customers embrace its solution. All said, as the landscape of interconnection and cloud connectivity evolves, we believe Megaport is a provider to watch closely as it has the potential to disrupt the standard interconnection model."

Megaport struck a deal last year with EdgeConneX to put its interconnection services in EdgeConneX’s U.S. data centers.