Thomson Reuters to Serve Singapore Exchange Data Center Customers

Trading companies using colocation services in the Singapore data center operated by the Singapore Exchange now have the option to connect directly to the market data platform by the New York-based media giant Thomson Reuters.

Singapore is already one of Asia’s primary business and telecommunications hubs, and as its importance continues to grow, so do the local data center infrastructure needs of companies both foreign and domestic. Many Singapore firms have “small infrastructure footprints,” according to Reuters, but have large market data requirements to access global markets, which can be expensive.

Reuters already offers access to its Elektron suite as a managed service out of its own Singapore data center. The addition of Elektron Managed Services inside Singapore Exchange’s colocation facility simply adds the amount of market players who can potentially use it.

Most key players in Singapore’s trading ecosystem are likely to have servers in the Singapore Exchange data center anyway. Now, if they want a direct link to Elektron, they can simply buy a cross-connect between their engines and the Elektron servers in the same data center.

Elektron is a link to global markets, offering low-latency market data feeds and analytics. Reuters also provides Elektron Managed Services in data centers in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai, Tokyo, and Sydney, as well as in Frankfurt, London, New York, Chicago, Toronto, Mexico City, and Sao Paulo.

The Singapore data center colocation market is already large for the city state’s size and growing quickly. Together with Hong Kong, it is viewed as a primary connectivity portal to mainland China, as well as a hub for connecting to the rest of the markets in Asia Pacific.

One analyst report published earlier this year estimated that Singapore was a $1 billion colocation market in 2014. The report projected the market would add another $200 million in revenue next year.

There are about 50 data center providers on the island. The biggest players in the market are Singaporean telecommunications company Singtel and Silicon Valley-based colocation giant Equinix. Other major players are UK’s Global Switch, Singapore’s Keppel, and San Francisco-based Digital Realty.

Only four of the top 10 colocation companies in Singapore are local.