Europe first for US internet services firm

KeyBridge, a managed internet services provider launched this week with data centers in London and Amsterdam.

The Virginia-based company was formed in November last year with a $60m injection from co-location facilities provider, Global Switch, originally a UK company now based in Luxembourg.

KeyBridge already has five customers, which between them are taking a range of services including managed firewall, VPN, hosting services, monitoring and reporting. Other services currently available include storage services and traffic management. Keybridge wouldn't name the companies.

Some of these five have also agreed to beta the next tranche of services due to be launched in Q3. These include intrusion analysis, wireless internet applications, media streaming, distributed load balancing and content delivery network.

KeyBridge is targeting potential customers that have a "mid-level internet presence" which may be large organisations who are now starting to migrate their core business processes online and who want to outsource this due to difficulties supporting the implementation in-house.

Bill Martorelli, an analyst with research firm Hurwitz Group, says going international from day one should help KeyBridge diffentiate itself in an increasingly crowded market. "This could appeal to a US company that's global and needs to expand into Europe or vice versa," he said.

Rama Chakaki, vice president of marketing at KeyBridge, said the company is operating from its UK and Dutch data centres ahead of those in the US because its ties with Global Switch opens doors to European customers.