FiberMedia Takes Aim at SEFs

Datacenter hosting provider FiberMedia is targeting emerging swap execution facility operators as potential clients of its datacenters as their requirements increase in response to regulatory moves to shift over-the-counter derivatives trading onto centrally-cleared, exchange-style platforms.

“We’re aligning with the OTC market… because the OTC market isn’t high frequency,” and FiberMedia is specifically not positioning itself to serve the co-location requirements of high-frequency traders, says John Panzica, senior vice president of sales at the vendor. Instead, FiberMedia is focusing on providing on-demand compute power to support clients as they grow and as data volumes grow as OTC markets experience similar data growth as exchange-traded markets.

“We are working with a couple of SEFs that have software platforms but need compute power… and we have all the resources to support that in our Secaucus, NJ facility,” Panzica says. “From a capital point of view, there are so many startups, and they want to build on a modular basis so they can scale. Then if they become successful, we can build them a private cloud with however much capacity and storage that they need.”

Meanwhile, though the vendor is not targeting low-latency traders, its facilities have multiple dark fiber connections, so clients could connect from SEFs hosted in FiberMedia’s datacenter to underlying equity exchange platforms hosted in nearby datacenters, he says.