OpenText Corporation has launched two new data centers in Japan to support its OpenText Trading Grid and OpenText Managed Services customers in Japan and across the Asia-Pacific region.
Headquartered in Waterloo, Canada, OpenText specializes in EIM (Enterprise Information Management) software to help businesses deal with data and support decisions. Among others, it offers a variety of cloud-enabled B2B services that are used by its customers.
The new data centers are located in Tokyo and Osaka, and will serve to provide additional capacity to support these services, as well as to address increasing concerns over data sovereignty.
Local processing
“As many countries, including Japan, begin to mandate local processing of their data, the data centers in Tokyo and Osaka offer our cloud-based information exchange services while addressing data sovereignty concerns,” said Nori Hayakawa, president of OpenText Japan in a statement.
This sentiment was echoed by Muhi Majzoub, the senior vice president of engineering at OpenText. Muhi noted that many countries have begun to develop new information compliance standards and regulations. “As a result, the geographic location of stored and shared information has become a growing concern,” he said.
The topic of data sovereignty is not limited to Japan, and is indeed one of the growing issues faced by businesses in the Asia Pacific. It has led cloud vendors such as Microsoft and SAP to expand their data center footprint in Asia as they seek to address this concern.
For example, we reported in August on how SAP is looking to establish data centers in as many as six new locations by the end of the year. This is up from its existing three data centers in Osaka and Tokyo in Japan, and Sydney in Australia. In October, it was reported that Microsoft is building data centers - plural - in India by end-2015 to serve its Azure cloud and Office 365 customers there.