MEXICO - Telecoms & IT
Chief Executive Officer, DE-CIX & Chair of the Board, DE-CIX Group AG
Bio
Ivo Ivanov has been CEO at DE-CIX and Chair of the Board of the DE-CIX Group AG since 2022. Prior to this, Ivanov was COO of DE-CIX & CEO of DE-CIX International, responsible for the company’s global business activities. He has more than 20 years of experience in the regulatory, legal and commercial internet environment. Ranked as one of the top 100 most influential professionals of the telecoms industry (Capacity Magazine’s Power 100 listing, 2021, 2022, and 2023), Ivanov is regularly invited to speak at various industry-leading conferences around the globe.
We see a dynamic market in general, but especially now in Latam and Central America, and Mexico is an important part of this region. The Mexican market has a huge population of almost 100 million Internet users, and the prediction is for a rise to 125 million by 2028. We see a dramatic increase in investment in subsea cables, connecting Asia, Europe, and LATAM. This activity has started to change the role Mexico can and should play in the future, not only as a major market but as a crossroads for new traffic patterns between Asia, North and South America, and Europe, crossing the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. This is a perfect stage for an internet exchange as an interconnection hub. Our approach is to create the next new digital hub in Mexico. We are committed to our neutrality and are not owned by a data center. We do not operate data centers, but partner with different data centers, as well as with different carriers. DE-CIX Mexico is a 100% subsidiary of DE-CIX Group AG so it is entirely neutral, with no joint venture. We launched the first two platforms in Mexico City and Querétaro, but this is just the beginning. We will expand our presence into other data centers with other operators. This is the model we run, comprising distributed Internet Exchanges. For example, in New York, we are present in 20 data centers operated by 16 operators. In essence, we believe this is the right time to enter the market.
An internet exchange allows direct interconnection between different types of networks without intermediates, hops, or detour that reduce latency. An internet exchange allows a highly integrated ecosystem and reduces this complexity. This makes it efficient, secure, and high-performance. This is important because latency is the new currency. The more complex and sensitive applications become, the more real-time the connectivity needs to be. Latency is related to the distance that data needs to travel. An internet exchange improves latency because of the localization of traffic, encouraging content, application and cloud service providers to host or cache their services locally in a market like Mexico and interconnect with the local internet access networks directly onsite. And here, we see a huge wave of different industries entering the Mexican market, such as manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and more, all with a huge demand for digital services. DE-CIX Mexico will offer great cloud connectivity solutions to support enterprises in creating digital assets, enabling them to offer new types of digital products to their customers, and thus increase their revenue.
Over time, we will add additional data service operators. Our goal for the coming years is to open more platforms across the country because the south cannot be served out of the center or the north due to latency. We also plan to deliver new types of products related to the future of the digital world. There is always demand, especially regarding topics like digital manufacturing and autonomous driving, for the management of IoT services or infrastructure. In the future, we will see small and agile interconnection setups that are even more energy efficient, so they can be placed next to a cell tower or a highway crossroad, to even further reduce the distance data needs to travel and interconnect networks even closer to the data source. We are also preparing heavily for AI, offering AI interconnection solutions for enterprises that will require low-latency connectivity and interconnection to AI as a service provider and cloud-based AI infrastructure. I foresee increased demand everywhere in terms of traffic. Now is the time for Mexico to assume a key role in the global landscape as a digital hub.
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