Interoute

Interoute
Private
Industry Telecommunications
Founded 2002
Headquarters London, United Kingdom
Website http://www.interoute.com

Interoute Communications Ltd, is a privately held telecommunications company, it operates Europe's largest cloud services[1] platform. Their network extends from Europe to North America, the Middle East and Africa and customers range from international enterprises and global telecommunications operators.

With ten subsea landing stations ringing the edge of Europe, it acts as the landing point for a number of submarine cable systems, as well as providing the European link to the SEACOM cable[2] connecting East and South Africa to Europe. Mediterranean operators Tunisie Telecom, Malta’s GO and Greece’s OTE link directly to the Interoute network in Italy.

Operations

Interoute’s network is the largest privately owned Europe-wide IP cloud. [3]

Interoute's offices: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, plus Network Operations Centres in Sofia and Prague and Customer Service Centres in Prague.

History

Interoute was formed in mid-2002, amidst the collapse of the telecommunications sector.[4] Four weeks after its holding company i-21 Holdings Ltd., went into administration,[5] Interoute Telecommunications was forced into administration too[6] by its main supplier, Alcatel. It undertook extensive restructuring and sold its traditional telephony operations in order to concentrate exclusively on network and Internet services. A final settlement with Alcatel was reached, effective February 2003.

The core of Interoute’s assets is a purpose-built network spanning the European Union. That physical infrastructure was supplemented through a series of acquisitions. Interoute acquired the Ebone portion of the KPNQwest NV network from receivers McStay Luby in July 2002. The deal transferred eight high-capacity Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) into Interoute’s ownership, at a cost rumoured to be a fraction of the €645 million KPNQwest paid for it.[7] Between 2003 and 2007 Interoute acquired a number of businesses, including: Virtue Broadcasting’s Media Services Division, to expand its value-added services portfolio;[8] Central European Communications Holdings BV (CECOM) and its operating subsidiaries in Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Poland and Romania, which extended its footprint in the CEE;[9] the European operations of hosting provider VIA NET.WORKS;[10] and PSINet’s European operations in Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands and Switzerland; plus Managed Services businesses in Sweden and Bulgaria. More recently (Oct 2014), they acquired Vtesse Group to expand their cloud services portfolio across the UK.

Interception allegations

In August 2013, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung stated that Interoute has been involved in GCHQ's Tempora programme under the codename "Streetcar".[11][12]

A few days later Interoute was one of eight respondents in a legal case taken to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal by NGO Privacy International concerned with "indiscriminate interception and storing of huge amounts of data" and "failure to have a publicly accessible legal framework".[13][14]

Financial

A privately held company, Interoute is owned by the Sandoz Family Foundation,[15] one of the world's largest private family foundations, and by Dubai Holding, a major investment company of the United Arab Emirates.

Products

Offering unified ICT services. Interoute’s services broadly fall into the categories of network infrastructure, voice, data, and managed services.

Cloud Computing Services - see Interoute Virtual Data Centre (VDC)- a scalable, fully automated Infrastructure as a Service solution, providing on-demand computing, storage and applications integrated into the IT infrastructure.

Dedicated hosting service- Interoute was named as a leader in the 2013 Magic Quadrant for European Managed Hosting 2013. Gartner evaluates vendors based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute.

Managed Security Services, Application Management, Data center Services, Colocation (business), Unified Communications - certified by Microsoft to provide SIP-trunking for enterprise customers who use Microsoft Outlook Communication Server (OCS), Unified Connectivity - MPLS VPN.

References

  1. ↑ http://www.interoute.com/unified-ict/computing/cloud-services company website
  2. ↑ http://www.itu.int/ituweblogs/treg/PermaLink,guid,cb9f01a3-7559-4479-8a3f-26fa13fa9f27.aspx
  3. ↑ http://web2.sys-con.com/node/770174
  4. ↑ http://money.cnn.com/2001/12/27/techinvestor/lashinsky/
  5. ↑ http://www.itworld.com/021203interoute
  6. ↑ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3301625/Interoute-hit-by-310m-debt.html
  7. ↑ http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=18529
  8. ↑ http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-104379239.html
  9. ↑ http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=53084
  10. ↑ http://it.moldova.org/news/two-largest-web-hosting-acquisitions-in-recent-memory-4442-eng.html
  11. ↑ "Snowden enthüllt Namen der spähenden Telekomfirmen" (in German). Süddeutsche Zeitung.
  12. ↑ Ball, James; Harding, Luke; Garside, Juliette (3 August 2013). "BT and Vodafone among telecoms companies passing details to GCHQ". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 October 2013.
  13. ↑ Ball, James (9 August 2013). "Privacy International to challenge telecoms firms over GCHQ cooperation". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 October 2013.
  14. ↑ Charlton, Alistair (9 August 2013). "Privacy International Challenges Telecom Giants over GCHQ Tempora Surveillance". International Business Times. Retrieved 26 October 2013.
  15. ↑ http://www.sandozfondation.ch/en/new-technologies/interoute/index.html

External links