Whilst multinationals have traditionally steered clear from establishing data centers in the region due to challenging market conditions, the home-grown data center industry in Africa has been steadily growing, mainly driven by investments from telecom operators and financial institutions.
This will be a key focus of DCD Middle East and Africa on 25 April at the Madinat Jumeirah in Dubai. Participations already include stakeholders from 7 key markets across the region.
““In East Africa we are seeing rapidly accelerating demand coming from global content providers such as Akamai, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon who rely on low latency high performance access to customers to effectively deliver their services. In addition, a growing number of local enterprises, Telcos, mobile network operators, and governments also increasingly rely on low-latency high speed connections”, says Anthony Voscarides, CEO of Djibouti Data Center, who will be joining a panel alongside Etisalat at the DCD event in April.
The exponential smartphone usage growth and demand for high content delivery is causing this flurry in developments of data centers and points of presence (POP) infrastructure in regional facilities across Africa.
South Africa now boast a handful of high-quality facilities of its own, whilst MainOne recently launched the most comprehensive colocation facility in Nigeria serving the West African Market, and Liquid Telecoms plans to build a new undersea cable from Africa to the Middle East towards the end of 2016.
“There is still a lot of work to be done to reduce latency, increase connectivity, and lower costs for network operators and end users; however the opportunities in the African markets are vast”, adds Voscarides.
New Silk Road spirit
The UAE has emerged as a “pivotal” trade and investment partner for Africa, linking the continent to Asia and Europe.
“Dubai has become a node of connectivity linking Europe and the Americas to Asia and Africa, and vice-versa. With the latest investments in cable connectivity, this growth will continue, opening up tremendous opportunities for the players within the industry’s ecosystem” says George Rockett, CEO & Co-founder of DatacenterDynamics.
DCD Converged Middle East and Africa is a unique event which will connect the key stakeholders from carriers, ISPs, data center operators, Cloud Service Providers and CDNs with leading regional governments and enterprises to debate how the industry can collectively overcome the challenges in order to meet the needs of the digital economy in the MEA market.
Registration is free for qualified end-users .If your company operates its own on/off premise data center(s), or if you are a significant end-user of data center and cloud services and you are involved in technology planning, procurement, implementation, and operations, then you may qualify Click here to apply.
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