The South London facility, which offers 930sqm of premium new space, will host high-end IT services for BT's growing base of customers in the £5.2bn European data centre services market.

The new site will greatly bolster BT's capacity and its ability to deliver the scope of services offered for business continuity, IT Transformation, and IT infrastructure hosting and management to large enterprise and public sector customers looking for secure facilities within this geographically important area.

Utilising biometric security measures the data centre will conform to the infrastructure security standards required by high-end customers, including those in financial services and government. It will also meet high industry standards in terms of the Uptime Institute's availability performance criteria and is designed to support a power load of 1,500W/sqm.

In May 2006, BT Global Services was positioned as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Pan-European Web-Hosting Providers. Evaluated on ability to execute and completeness of vision, the analyst house said BT's widespread European presence makes it better suited than others in the market to deliver in-country hosting across a large number of locations or where single-source access to associated bandwidth across the region is important.

Andy Green, CEO of BT Global Services, said: "Data centre services are fundamental to the delivery of networked IT services. This significant investment in a new data centre within the M25, where real estate space is at a premium, demonstrates our long-term commitment to supplying world class networked IT services globally.

"Our ambition is to drive growth of 20 per cent per annum in the data centre services market. This new prime location facility is the cornerstone of BT's strategy to continue to deliver the highest level of service to customers across our data centre service portfolio while putting us in a strong position to build on our success."

The new data c centre will be service ready by September 2007 and BT has an exclusive option on a further hall of a similar size within the location for further planned expansion.