Speaking exclusively to Capacity, Job Witteman, CEO at AMS-IX, said that the New York market held a number of interesting opportunities for the Dutch internet exchange.
“It is a difficult market and there are a lot of things to be fixed there,” Witteman said. “But it is definitively different from other markets, because there is not an incumbent internet exchange.”
Witteman admits that the US is unknown territory for the company, but having rolled out its exchange model in markets outside of Europe, remains confident it will be a success.
Witteman said that the launch responded to a push from the Open-IX initiative – an organisation designed to develop the neutral and distributed internet exchange model in the US.
The initiative consists of over 20 data centres – as well as internet network operators and content owners – and also spurred AMS-IX’s German competitors, DE-CIX, to launch a carrier and data centre-neutral internet exchange in New York in the same month.
“I think there is room enough for the two of us,” Witteman said of DE-CIX’s launch.
“In a sense you go for the same players, so yes there is competition, but it is good for the market to have choice. Our model is different to DE-CIX’s, so we hope that the market decides for its own good which one is best to work with.”
The internet exchange in New York is already accepting orders and AMS-IX plans to deploy its distributed internet exchange model across Chicago and Silicon Valley in the first and second quarters of 2014, respectively.
