Intabank has launched an exchange and a set of management tools that will allow companies to trade broadband capacity.
Called interbank, the service allows companies to sell excess internet bandwidth and private network connectivity -- including dormant overnight and weekend periods – to organisations wanting “burst capacity” for strategic projects or specific IT peak events, with no long-term contracts and for a fraction of traditional connectivity costs.
In order to use intabank, customers must be connected via one of 10 data centres from companies such as Equinix, Next DC, and iseek Communications– and once there they can offload their spare capacity into what the company calls a "dark pool" from which others cab purchase via an auction mechanism.
According to David McGrath, head of sales and marketing at ASE IT Networks, and a board member of intabank "The company started as a conversation we had with some of our ASE clients who through the nature of cloud are looking to optimise their IT and cloud based infrastructures across all different levels such as processing and storage."
"Connectivity came up in one of the conversations specifically around how could they maximize the efficiency of that better."
The project started 12 months ago, said McGrath. "And for the last six months we have been working with two clients in the media and finance industry on a working model around the concept. The goal was to help them to optimise bandwidth and to let them manage that both from the ability to tip in remnant inventory into a pool, or from a buyers' point of view to purchase short term burst capacity."
"The feedback was positive so we decided to take it outside of that customer base."
According to founder and chief executive officer, Andrew Sjoquist "intabank applies the cloud philosophy to the network and essentially virtualises the network. It allows more dynamic use of network infrastructure on an as-needed basis or as required by the applications being run."
Rather than being a replacement for carriers who provide long term Internet connectivity to organisations Sjoquist said the service is an insurance policy for any organisation wanting to monetise remnant bandwidth capacity they may have already purchased.
The pricing model allows the purchase of Internet capacity by “speed” (megabit per second - Mbps), or file “size” (gigabyte - GB), identifying the physical path that the internet traffic takes, rather than which carrier it travels on.
intabank has the potential to flip the connectivity market on its head and impress both the CIO and CFO alike according to Oliver de Nicolai, senior analyst at Longhaus, "intabank is more than a technology platform. It is a disruptive philosophical approach to bandwidth management that offers customers flexibility for their ever changing business requirements. intabank will certainly flip the connectivity market on its head and impress both the CIO and CFO alike."
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