Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy by GDP, is in the midst of an unprecedented data centre construction boom, even as terrestrial connections and lastmile broadband connectivity continue to lag, industry insiders say.
With all three submarine cable landing stations in close proximity to Lagos, urban areas in the commercial nerve centre have been the first to benefit from faster internet connections, according to them.
The same cannot be said about rural areas without requisite broadband infrastructure. The race to rapidly expand the nation’s Information Technology (IT) infrastructure to power the fast-growing dot com and online banking enterprises, industry insiders say, is providing fresh business opportunities for foreign equipment vendors, as well as local technology firms, and could soon see Africa’s most populous country emerge with one of the most advanced computing infrastructures in the world.
“Abundance of data, its rapid growth rate at unexpected speeds, global digitisation, hence higher dependence on data availability, security, integrity and lack of qualified facilities to host them, are driving data centre projects in Nigeria”, says Mehdi Paryavi, president, TechXact Group Corporation, USA in an interview.
According to him, this trend is also taking place in advanced economies where banks, oil and gas, and other multi-national firms that require high-speed, secure digital storage facilities, are moving away from run ning their own in-house computer centres, towards outsourcing this business to commercial operators.
“The central bank is seeking an effective data storage centre, and banks generally will be one of the main drivers for data centres, not just for banks but for stockbrokers, insurance firms”, said Rex Mafiana, chief executive officer (CEO) at FPG Technologies & Solutions Limited.
Global data centre operators have flocked to the Nigerian market, particularly since 2011, with the likes of Google’s cloud platform aggressively marketing their services to corporations. Microsoft, US based software firm, launched its global Office 365 cloud solution in Nigeria in June 2012. Dell’s global CEO, on the other hand, visited Nigeria in July 2012 in a bid to promote Dell servers or local data warehousing initiatives. Massive investments being ploughed into data centre initiatives are expected to also put the country’s 17.6 million Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) on the global stage. “With data centres, SMEs can get access to innovative and affordable computing services that would improve productivity and efficiency”, Austin Okere, group managing director, Computer Warehouse Group (CWG), told BusinessDay at the launch of the firm’s multi-million naira data centre project in Lagos.
“With our own data centre, we will launch innovative services to Nigeria’s entrepreneur community. We are going to provide them with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications on the cloud which they would pay for on a subscription basis”, he further explained.
