Aug. 20, 2003 -- The NAP of the Americas resides in a fortress-like Miami data center facility that was engineered to weather a Category 5 hurricane. The NAP's operator, Terremark Worldwide has shown an uncanny ability to weather financial crises as the data center industry has endured a "perfect storm" of challenges.
Maybe that's why chief executive Manual Medina expresses tremendous confidence in Terremark's prospects, even as the company's auditors and financial statements raise hard questions about its future.
"We've never been in a better position," Medina said in an interview earlier this month. "We are projecting cash-flow positive by the end of the year."
To achieve that goal, Terremark says the NAP will need to generate revenues of at least $1.8 million per month from its services - nearly double its current revenue of about $1 million per month from 110 customers.
Is Terremark's optimism realistic? A year ago, the NAP had 52 customers and about $690,000 in monthly revenues. That translates to an annual growth rate of about 45 percent - strong performance by industry standards, but still well short of the 80 percent minimum growth Terremark is projecting to support its break-even date.
To close that gap, Terremark is focusing its energies on winning lucrative contracts to supply connectivity to government agencies. Earlier this year the company won a contract to connect the far-flung offices of the Department of State. Last month Terremark hired Ed Guevara, the federal government's Security Director for Miami International Airport, as vice president of corporate security.
"The NAP, in bringing all this connectivity together under one roof, really makes a compelling value to large users of bandwidth," said Medina. "And one of the largest users of bandwidth is the federal government."
Network Access Points (NAPs) are major intersections of the Internet, where the networks of local and regional access providers meet Internet backbones and pass Internet transmissions from one network to another. These public exchanges transmit enormous amounts of data to and from each connected network.
In 1999 a coalition of carriers and ISPs formed to create a NAP in South Florida's "Internet Coast," then home to more than 1,000 telecom firms. A split emerged over the best way to hurricane-proof the network access point. BellSouth, which favored a multi-site approach, left the coalition in early 2000 and announced its own network access point initiative, known as BellSouth MIX. That initiative was discontinued last year.
Meanwhile, the NAP of the Americas coalition decided to house its equipment in Terremark's new telecom facility in downtown Miami, with strong support from city civic leaders.

CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE >>