The
transition to cloud based services in Lagos is coming into view. As the
Lagos Infraco, Main One wants to be able to offer pervasive fibre and
is launching Infrastructure as a Service with EMC and Microsoft. Russell
Southwood spoke to its CEO Funke Opeke about where the market has got
to,
Main
One’s independent data centre in Lagos launched in mid-January this
year. It has 600 racks and is adjacent to its cable landing station in
Lekki. Opeke says that:”Interest globally has been phenomenal” but it
hasn’t yet sold a lot of racks.
Nevertheless,
it is aiming the facility at three categories of customers. The most
obvious category is banks and businesses that are putting more of their
business online.
In
order to do this, they have a need to step up their data centre
infrastructure and also require a back-up facility for their growing
data centre:”We’ve had a bank at the cable landing station for two years
and they’ve moved to the new data centre.” Some visitors to the new
data have been sufficiently impressed with the new facility that they
are considering making it their primary data centre.
The
second category of customers are tech companies that need to be able to
offer data centre services as well as connectivity and connections to
other networks. In due course, as with Teraco in South Africa, the data
centre is likely to become a significant meet point for a variety of
different operators:” We’re the best connected data centre. All the
large operators and ISPs are connected with us and we connect to as many
as 10 major operators. We’re becoming a meet point.”
Indeed
Main One is partnering with two of these tech companies – EMC and
Microsoft – to launch an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) product in
April. This includes things like private clouds, virtual LANs, cloud
hosting on virtual servers and virtual data centres:”We’re currently
running a couple of pilot customers and want to be able to offer this
for e-commerce companies in Nigeria.”
The
data centre sector in Nigeria is a combination of proprietary
facilities run by mobile operators and ISPs and independent facilities.
There are currently two main independent facilities, Main One and Rack
Centre, the former is in Lekki and the latter in Ikeja.
But
as Opeke observes:”Two data centres does not an industry make so we
continue to collaborate. If someone wants to make us their primary data
centre, then they can back up at Rack Centre and vice versa.” MTN is
also upgrading its data centre but beyond that there are only relatively
small facilities.
But
is the broader connectivity picture changing yet?:”A few years ago in
Nigeria banks had their main interactions with customers through their
branches and head office. Now customers are able to access services 24/7
on the internet. We’re talking to a Government agency in Nigeria that
wants people to be able to access its services from all over the world
24/7”.
“Banks
also need to need to be connected to their branches and across the
world and have taken on more bandwidth to do that.” The extra bandwidth,
increased infrastructure and much lower latency means that banks can
now operate enterprise software like SAP.
So
is the market yet read for cloud services?:”Not yet. But we see it
moving to Infrastructure as a Service as an OPEX model over the next 18
months as global service providers move into the space. The adoption of
Microsoft’s 365 Online has been phenomenal. These models are becoming
more attractive to big businesses. There are no major players yet
because it needs the applications but we’ll see an explosion in the
cloud over the next 18 months. We have one customer testing a platform
and another about to come on.”
So
what are the remaining connectivity blockages?:”We still need to extend
the reach of the fibre and offer affordable connectivity to people who
need it and that’s really only cost effective when we use our own
infrastructure.”
Main
One won the bid to be the Lagos Infraco:”Once we do that, then we can
extend our services and become pervasive and then you’ll get the next
generation of the cloud. We’ll be able to say to anyone who has a good
idea as a start-up, maybe it will be the next big start-up, come and use
the data centre.”
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Source: Balancingact-Africa
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