Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 06 | Page 52

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // DATA CENTRES MainOne leads West Africa data centre developments of ICT services and mobile broadband, the migration towards a digital economy, with Internet underpinning a lot of services across the region – better adoption of e-Governance, e-Health and e-Commerce initiatives and businesses looking to host their growing digital information locally. According to him, MainOne is anticipating the growing demand and has started building its second Tier III+ data centre in Sagamu, a blooming industrial cluster in South West Nigeria. Funke Opeke, founder and CEO of MainOne W est Africa’s premier connectivity and data centre solutions company, MainOne has reinforced its commitment to building out West Africa’s data centre capacity at the Data Center Africa Summit, which took place this June at the DataCloud Europe 2017 conference in Monaco. During the event, the company’s Chief Executive Officer, Funke Opeke was nominated as one of 50 top influencers transforming the data centre and cloud landscape in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Enterprise Powered by Excel The DataCloud Europe conference, which has attracted over 1,800 data centre and cloud executives from more than 60 countries as well as over 90 exhibiting companies, is the foremost networking event for data centre players in EMEA. Where security, performance and reliability are paramount. Choose Excel. During the conference, Gbenga Adegbiji, General Manager of MainOne’s MDXi data centres, joined an expert panel on the Africa Data Centre Leadership to discuss strategies for achieving improved data centre and cloud penetration across the continent. The panel started with a review of the challenges of data centres across the continent in comparison to other markets, highlighting low demand as the biggest constraint, due to offshore data hosting of content. Excel’s world-class premium performance end-to-end infrastructure solution is powering some of the most exciting and innovative new projects in the world. Excel. Designed, manufactured, supported and delivered without compromise. With improved access to Internet services on the continent, leading content providers are finding that the high latency experienced with serving Africa from offshore does not effectively engage the market and have started establishing beachheads for content in data centres on the continent. Read the case study excel-networking.com/case-studies In his comments, Adegbiji asserted that despite the limitations, the opportunities for data centre growth are enormous given the upsurge in the use excel-networking.com INTELLIGENTCIO 52 www.intelligentcio.com www.intelligentcio.com Adegbiji also highlighted MainOne’s efforts at improving transit traffic in Nigeria with its partnership with the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN), and its new interconnection service OpenConnect, which facilitates increased interconnection, collaboration and peering for telecom operators, ISPs and content providers within its data centre. According to him, this service would enhance local Internet performance, lower costs and minimise traffic bottlenecks for Internet traffic in Nigeria. Also on the Africa Data Centre Leadership Panel was the President, Schneider Electric, Francophone Africa, Paul-François Cattier; Managing Director, BCX Nigeria, Dr Ayo Adegboye; Managing Director, Rack Centre Nigeria, Ayotunde Coker; Founder and CEO, icolo.io, Ranjith Cherickel and Director General Group, Orange Africa, Fatoumata Dieng. In its 6+ years of operation, MainOne has established a strong reputation as the preferred provider of connectivity and data centre solutions in West Africa. The company owns and operates MDXi data centre; the only Tier III certified colocation facility in West Africa with combined PCI DSS, ISO 27001 and 9001 certifications. ¡ INTELLIGENTCIO 53