Annabeth Leow

It began from a standing start just three years ago but the data centres unit of ST Telemedia (STT) has al-ready built an impressive portfolio.

STT Global Data Centres has 50 fa-cilities across numerous countries, including in Singapore where it is ramping up expansion.

STT Defu, which opened in the in-dustrial estate near Hougang just last year, is almost full, with a sec-ond centre on its campus due by the end of next year.

Chief executive Bruno Lopez notes that the unit’s relatively late arrival to the fast-growing sector may not have been that much of a handicap in the end: “What was, strictly speaking, potentially late is not really late if you see where we are today in terms of positioning.”

The company, which is in the Temasek Holdings stable, believes it has carved out a niche by running data centres as a service provider in-stead of owning them as a real es-tate investment trust.

Mr Lopez says: “Why are we fill-ing it up in less than one year, and others are not able to fill it up? That’s the key question. It has to be

about the service.”Chief operating officer Jonathan

King adds that the launch last year of the STT Connect unit, a cloud ser-vice solutions provider, does not mean that the firm is going to “morph into any form of a cloud provider per se”.

He says: “STT Connect we see as an enabler that helps some of our smaller and medium-sized cus-tomers venture into the cloud and execute their cloud strategy. It’s not a business that is in competi-tion with... Microsoft, Amazon, Google.”

Mr Lopez tells The Straits Times that STT Global Data Centres is not looking to build up assets for the sake of flipping them, either. “I think we’re very focused in our offer-ing. I think that helps our customers as well, because we’re not trying to

be a real estate investor... We oper-ate it as an operating company.”

The same thinking has guided the data centres unit’s expansion, which involved acquiring stakes in country-specific partners such as GDS Services in China and Virtus Data Centres in Britain, as well as forming joint ventures with telecommunications companies like StarHub here and India’s Tata Communications.

“We feel South-east Asia is a very underserved market today, so we are actively looking to expand into some South-east Asian countries,” says Mr Lopez.

Australia and New Zealand are also in his sights. “Then you’ve got Europe itself, Paris, Frankfurt, Madrid and Dublin, which are at-tractive hubs themselves.”

Mr King says a key challenge is

the breakneck pace of change and the unpredictability of the data sec-tor. “If you roll back the clock five years... operators would wait for a pre-commitment, like you do in a residential development or a retail development.”

But now, the evolution of the cloud has made it difficult for large customers to predict “what cities they need to be in (and) in what quantums”.

But the future is bright, with Mr King predicting “the need for data centres, the growth drivers for data centres remain very strong” – whether bottom-up, from the tech-nical demands of media consump-tion, or top-down, in how govern-ments regulate secure, long-term in-formation storage.

leowhma@sph.com.sg

TOKYO • Bitcoin backers celebrated as the community embraced a new mechanism to improve usage and al-low it to scale, boosting confidence in the virtual cur-rency and sending prices back near record highs.

The community, which had been split on how best to make the cryptocurrency more manageable, rallied behind a code upgrade known as SegWit2x, which aims to increase the network’s transaction capacity.

That fuelled a rally on Thursday in bitcoin’s price against the US dollar, which had plummeted from a peak last month as concerns grew about its future.

“We’re thrilled to get past this impasse,” said Mr An-drew Lee, head of bitcoin-shopping start-up purse.io, whose team celebrated with beers at their San Fran-cisco office. The development opens “the doors to much-awaited innovations”, he said.

Bitcoin enthusiasts from New York and San Francisco to Hong Kong and Tokyo gathered in bars and offices to hold impromptu parties, while others took to Twitter and social media to cheer the move and price rally.

The impasse arose from a limit placed on the size of blocks underpinning the network in bitcoin’s early days, in order to prevent hacker attacks. As the virtual currency grew in popularity over the past nine years, transaction times and processing fees soared, curtail-ing the community’s ability to process payments with the same efficiency as services such as Visa.

Miners and developers were locked in a heated de-bate for years on how best to upgrade the software, culminating in the recent clash. More than 93 per cent of miners who function as the backbone of the digital token network locked in support for BIP91, the first necessary step in implementing SegWit2x, ac-cording to Coin Dance, a website tracking adoption.

Bitcoin’s miners are independent groups that verify and process bitcoin’s transactions by solving com-plex computational problems, in order to be re-warded by fees and creation of the digital currency.

SegWit2x is essentially a compromise between two main competing camps. One proposed a direct ap-proach, seeking to increase the block size. The other, a group of developers known as Core, pushed for a long-term solution by moving some data outside of the main network, a scheme called SegWit that had been re-sisted by miners as it could diminish their influence.

In the end, the miners agreed to adopt SegWit, but also increase the block size to 2MB.

The upgrade is not final. The BIP91 lock-in has a grace period of about two days, during which miners will prepare to activate the software. It will then take about two weeks for SegWit to be fully adopted. Devel-opers still warn about potential hacker attacks that could disrupt the process.

Then, three months from now, the community will face another challenge when some of the world’s big-gest miners move to adopt the second phase of the proposal – the doubling of the block size. BLOOMBERG

STT Global Data Centres has carved out a niche by running data centres as a service provider and STT Defu, which opened just last year, is almost full, with a second centre on its campus due by the end of next year. Chief executive Bruno Lopez says the firm is looking to expand into South-east Asia, and eyeing Australia and New Zealand. ST PHOTO: DESMOND WEE

Its unit has 50 facilities in many markets and is ramping up expansion in S’pore and beyond

STT tears ahead with data centre growth

Bitcoin prices surge as upgrade breaks impasse

| SATURDAY, JULY 22, 2017 | THE STRAITS TIMES | BUSINESS C3