FiberMedia Hires Equinix's John Panzica to Drive Expansion into Financial Colo Market
Eyeing the colocation needs of hedge funds and other client segments, John Panzica has joined FiberMedia’s executive team to spearhead sales and marketing for the company’s network of six data centers in the New Jersey/New York area.
Panzica joined FiberMedia on Jan. 3 after leaving Switch & Data, which was acquired by Equinix, a large operator of collocation service data centers.
As FiberMedia’s SVP of sales, Panzica will take the lead role in rebranding the company and develop a strategy to cater to the New York, New Jersey financial industry and the enterprise market at large, according to the company’s announcement.
Panzica arrived at FiberMedia less than a month after it named a new management team and was recapitalized through an investment by The Stephens Group, a Little Rock, Arkansas-based private-equity firm. Founded in 1999, FiberMedia provides data center locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Secaucus, Jersey City, Westchester and Cleveland with 140,000 square feet of space. “FiberMedia flew under the radar. With venture capital and a new management team, we’re poised to go after new markets,” says Panzica, who brings more than 15 years of experience in the financial services, telecom and data center industries to his new position.
In an interview with Advanced Trading, Panzica said he decided to make the career move to get back to more of an entrepreneurial company, noting that FiberMedia is akin to the Switch & Data smaller company model. Of the six data centers operated by FiberMedia, five sit in the New York/NJ marketplace and Secaucus is the headquarters and flagship data center, which is a fully redundant facility. In addition to the redundancy, another advantage is that FiberMedia’s Secaucus facility sits in the geographic corridor between Nasdaq’s data center in Carteret, N.J. and NYSE Euronext’s data center in Mahwah, N.J.
“It’s in the corridor where (Switch & Data’s) North Bergen data center was and where the Equinix Secaucus data center is,” he explains. “It’s a fiber rich area and there’s a lot of power there,” he adds. Panzica sees an opportunity to reach out to financial applications that are outside the high frequency trading spectrum. “From a geographic proximity or trading standpoint, not everybody has to be next to a matching engine. There are a lot of applications that are latency tolerant,” he adds.
Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio
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