NextDC offers on-demand virtual exchange

NextDC has launched a new 'independent' switching platform that allows on-demand virtual connections to participating data centres.

The company's chief operating officer Simon Cooper debuted the new business unit - dubbed AXON Systems - during a keynote speech at the CommsDay conference in Sydney this morning.

The new AXONVX service competes against existing on-demand virtual data centre link products from vendors such as Megaport, which announced an expansion to the US yesterday.

AXONVX will not be tied to NextDC's data centre offerings - it will allow users to choose their data centres and carriers.

Users can either select and enable their virtual connections through an interface, or through APIs that can be integrated into their systems.

"It's a way of connecting companies that are housing co-location, cloud providers, network providers and portal providers already, to try to bring together from a neutral point of view all of these elements," Cooper said.

"So the service providers, or the solution providers, or even the enterprise can use the pieces they want to use when they want to use it and not have to solve that particular piece of the puzzle.

"And it removes that road-block of fixed cost, and slow delivery, and unknown quality within the data centre, across the nation."

Cooper said one of the drivers for the offering was customers struggling with stitching together a hybrid cloud solution without painting themselves into a corner.

"[There's] a mix of a lot of co-lo and legacy IT, and there's a lot of hardware that was only bought a year or two ago that the CFO is not going to shutdown for a few years, and there's legacy hardware that someone bought 15 years ago that no-one wants to touch because no-one knows how it works, but it's absolutely critical to some core systems," he said.

"And then you've got private cloud, and I've sat in meetings with IT directors of retail companies and they've said that for the amount of cloud they'd want to use in a semi-unconstrained way is going to cost them more than if they buy their IT infrastructure in a smart way, and manage and control it."