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Switch & Data Hires Panzica to Spearhead Financial Services Practice

Targets collocation services for electronic trading with new data center in North Bergen, New Jersey

With the demand for collocation services for electronic trading outstripping the supply of data centers, Switch & Data has hired John Panzica as a vice president to develop and lead its strategy for the financial services industry.

Panzica is 20-year veteran of the financial services and data center industries, most recently with Reliance Globalcom (formerly Yipes), where he led the development of the Ethernet-based Extranet, FinancialConnect! And Proximity/Collocation. He joined Switch & Data in September with a key focus on defining strategy for the company, which expects to grow its footprint in financial services.

“When you’re looking at market data and electronic trading and algo trading, there’s a great demand for infrastructure to support that whether it’s data space or interconnectivity. Those things are all related and Switch & Data is there,” said Panzica in an interview.

In October, Switch & Data opened a new 160,000 square foot data center facility in North Bergen, New Jersey, which is expected to attract financial market customers by offering collocation services five miles away from Manhattan. “Because of the power density and the ability to get additional square footage,” Panzica is betting that financial firms will be willing to collocate their black-box trading servers across the bridge. This brings the company’s data center capacity in the market to more than 250,000 gross square feet.

“If you try to get more than a cabinet and couple of square feet in Carteret, New Jersey, near Nasdaq OMX’s (data center), it’s hard to do that,” says Panzica. He said there is great flexibility in the rack space in the North Bergen site. “Not only do you get the power, but you can put more of your operation there,” he said. “If you have a DMA (direct-market access) platform and a dark pool, you have the ability to host more of your applications in that environment instead of trying to collocate right next to an exchange,” said Panzica.

The North Bergen site offers 200 watts per square foot, which Panzica says is a power density advantage over other data centers that offer 150 watts or 125 watts per sq. foot—depending on when they were built. Switch & Data has interconnected this new site to its existing 111 8th Avenue and 60 Hudson Street sites in New York.

In his new role, Panzica will help financial services companies design, develop and deploy infrastructure solutions to support their electronic trading applications. Switch & Data will focus on three segments of the market, including pre/post trading service providers, the buy side and sell-side community. Pre-trade will cover anything that happens prior to the trade, including analytical data, reference data, market data through post-trade processes, such as clearing. On the sell-side, Switch & Data is being evaluated as the future home of any sort of DMA or order routing platform, as well as dark pool or crossing networks, because of its proximity to the markets. Panzica reports that the company is having a lot of success with proprietary traders in the hedge fund marketplace who are looking for new homes for their order routing and execution platforms.

Switch & Data is a ten-year old company based in Tampa, Florida, that provides network neutral data centers and Internet exchange services. It operates 34 data centers in 23 cities in the U.S. and Canada, with over 950 customers in North America. “The core products are space, power and cooling,” explains Chris Reid, a company spokesman. Switch & Data takes long-term leases or complete buildings or floors or suites in buildings. It adds redundant UPS space with assured fuel contracts, as well as connectivity and “meet me” rooms where all the carriers meet.

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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