Marco Brandstätter

Regional Director Middle East & South Asia at DE-CIX

Speaker

Marco Brandstätter is an Internet infrastructure entrepreneur and interconnection expert with more than three decades of experience building telecommunications businesses, Internet ecosystems, and digital infrastructure across Europe, the Middle East, and emerging markets.

Today, Marco serves as Global Program Manager for DE-CIX as a Service, where he works with partners around the world to develop and operate Internet Exchanges and interconnection ecosystems. Over the past decade, he has played a key role in DE-CIX’s expansion across the Middle East, helping establish and grow Internet Exchanges and digital hubs in markets including the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Qatar, and Jordan. Marco has been closely involved with UAE-IX in Dubai since its early days, supporting its development from a newly established Internet Exchange into the region’s most important Internet Exchange platform.

More recently, his work has included the development of IRAQ-IXP, Doha IX, and AqabaIX, with a particular focus on keeping Internet traffic local, improving resilience, attracting international content and cloud providers, and strengthening regional digital ecosystems. His career in the Internet industry began in 1992 when he co-founded software company HAPPYsoft, followed by HAPPYnet in 1995, one of Austria’s early Internet Service Providers. In 2003, he founded telecommunications wholesale provider i3b, expanding the company internationally before selling it to its largest wholesale customer in 2010.

Combining an entrepreneurial mindset with deep technical and commercial understanding of Internet infrastructure, Marco has spent his career bringing together network operators, carriers, content providers, data centers, governments, and technology partners to turn new interconnection concepts into sustainable infrastructure businesses. In 2026, Marco was named to Capacity’s Power 50 Middle East, recognizing influential leaders shaping the region’s digital infrastructure and connectivity industry