Australian Data Center Connectivity Firm Megaport Goes Public

Shares of Megaport, Brisbane-area-based provider of connectivity services for data centers that uses software defined networking platform to provision network connectivity, started trading on the Australian Securities Exchange Thursday under the ticker symbol MP1. The company raised AU$25 million through the IPO.

Megaport’s founder and executive chairman Bevan Slattery is a well-known Australian tech entrepreneur. He also co-founded the telco Pipe Networks and founded NextDC, a major Australian data center provider that went public in 2010 in a $40 million IPO.

NextDC, which Slattery left in 2013, also raised $30 million on ASX this week through an offering of additional shares.

Megaport sells network connectivity to large data center operators, such as enterprises, carriers, and cloud service providers. It is one of several companies that emerged recently to make connectivity provisioning faster and easier, since enterprises increasingly rely on a complex set of interconnections to run their businesses.

Another prominent example of a startup in this space is IIX, a Silicon Valley company that provides instant connectivity to any site on its long list of data centers around the world. IIX raised $26 million from a group of heavyweight Silicon Valley VCs in November.

Provisioning interconnection is a complex engineering task, and companies often hire contractors to help them set up links to other data centers or cloud service providers. Startups like Megaport and IIX promise to take that burden off their shoulders, providing easy-to-use cloud-based interfaces for network provisioning.

Megaport is a member of OpenDaylight, a Linux Foundation-governed open source SDN project.

Its shares were up 75 percent on the day of their debut on ASX.

Correction: While Megaport is a member of the OpenDaylight Project, its SDN platform is not based on OpenDaylight, as the previous version of this article erroneously stated.