March 15 (SeeNews) - U.S.-based International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre and colocation provider Equinix will open officially on April 9 a $19 million (16.9 million euro) data centre in Sofia, its second in Bulgaria, a senior official of the company's Bulgarian unit said.
"We are currently performing acceptance tests of the various systems and infrastructure," Equinix Bulgaria's sales director Vladislav Iankov told SeeNews last week on the sidelines of the Sofia Summit 2019, a regional event bringing together executives of telcos, IXPs, ISPs, cloud, streaming media, as well as providers of content and security solutions.
The new data centre will have 350 cabinets, with a possibility to add 1,100 cabinets in subsequent phases.
Equinix Bulgaria launched the expansion project in June as a green-field investment. The land plot on which the new interconnected data centre is built belongs to the company, and Equinix Bulgaria has the opportunity for expansion in the same location if there is market demand.
"In case of serious sales, there are opportunities for expansion," Iankov said.
In Bulgaria, Equinix has over a hundred clients, mostly providers of cloud services, network operators, big corporations and media companies. They use the Equinix colocation platform which links 200 data centres globally.
"Nine years ago, when we started our business, we were just nine people, and now, with the new interconnected data centre, we will be 19," Iankov said, adding that he expects the company to expand rapidly in the coming years, tapping on Bulgaria's development as a regional digital hub and the clients increasing demand for smaller latency.
The company, under the name 3DC, was founded in 2008 by Zdravko Nikolov, Stefan Stefanov and Vladislav Iankov. Since then the management team has remained the same. In 2013, UK-based Telecity Group acquired 100% of 3DC.
Equinix entered Bulgaria in 2016 with the acquisition of UK-based Telecity Group.
Equinix Bulgaria Data Centers EAD is fully-owned by Equinix Netherlands B.V., according to data from the Bulgarian Commercial Register.
According to the Global Interconnection Index, a market study published by Equinix, interconnection between enterprises and cloud and IT providers is projected to grow 98% per annum through 2021, supporting businesses building out new digital services and migrating existing workloads to third-party cloud platforms.
(1 euro = 1.95583 Bulgarian levs)