Backbone builder
Terremark CTO brought all his talents to bear on construction of the ‘NAP of the Americas’
Bannerman is the technology point person for Terremark, a Miami-based company that earned the rights to build during the course of only one year a whopping new center to house switching points for ISP traffic flowing between the United States and Latin America.
A network access point dubbed the “NAP of the Americas,” the facility went up on the site of a downtown Miami parking lot.
It will serve as the South Florida equivalent of the famed MAEs (metropolitan area exchanges), hulking centers across the country where backbone service providers hand off traffic.
“It’s a massive fortress of a building made of concrete and steel with no windows and big, heavy floors,” Bannerman says, describing the 750,000-square-foot facility.
Heading up the NAP’s technical operations was a challenge as gargantuan as the building itself, Bannerman says. The decisions and scenarios he faced ranged from construction-related matters to electrical and mechanical issues.
Still, he never considered turning down the opportunity. “How many times do people ask you to build a Tier 1 NAP? I don’t think this will happen again in America,” Bannerman says.
The career path that led Bannerman ultimately to the NAP was punctuated with entrepreneurial experience and posts in areas heavily regulated by government.
This experience would prove invaluable as Bannerman navigated the land mines of working with more than 100 often fiercely competitive carriers, now trying to live harmoniously under one roof.
Bannerman formerly held the position of vice president at Bell Canada International. After that, he set out to start IXS.NET, an IP telephony-services company based in China. Terremark bought the company in 2000 and offered Bannerman his current CTO spot.
“I would be able to focus once again on engineering design and operations and let someone else worry about funding and administration,” Bannerman says. This combined experience led to an overall grasp of the telecom business, which came into play often during the NAP’s construction, according to consultant Irving Padron, who served as Terremark’s CFO.
“Monty would specifically go out of his way to make sure those around him were well-educated in the task that we were going to undertake,” Padron says.
Garnering buy-in from those around him has indeed been a crucial skill for Bannerman. For instance, he sometimes had to hustle to maintain government support for the project.
Meanwhile, he delicately abided by a strict set of criteria put forth by a task force, appointed by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who viewed the NAP as a way to attract carriers eyeing the ripe Latin American market.
“There were two ground rules: The facility had to be carrier-neutral, which meant that for ‘Joe’s Barber Shop ISP’ and WorldCom, the price would be the same,” Bannerman says.
Daunting as they were, neither the outfitting of the giant facility nor the politics that Bannerman encountered turned out to be his biggest challenge. “I had to build an organization from scratch,” he says, meaning that he had to quickly pull together a 65-member technical staff.
Assembling the staff proved a steep climb, but it also brought the biggest rewards.”Any time you bring all new people together, you will see strong individuals jostling to express their own opinions. Finally, I was able to see them all heading in the same direction,” Bannerman says.
