Source: Data Frontier – Growing Africa’s Edge Data Centre Economy At Scale by DataEconomy
Thought Leadership and Insight from Ayotunde Coker, Managing Director of Rack Centre
For the second edition of the Datacloud Africa Leadership Summit we sat down with Ayotunde Coker, Managing Director of Rack Centre.
Datacloud: What do you see as the future drivers for the industry?
The emergence of broadband penetration will drive consumption of digital services, and therefore the demand for cloud leading to the growth of high-quality edge data centres at scale on the continent.
These factors will drive growth and the practical emergence of IoT and smart cities applications. An anecdote I use is the success of mobile telephony.
Cloud will become a key consumption vehicle driven by Africa specific innovations to pay as you go.
‘Sachet’ economies work in Africa as you can consume in small quantities, but at scale, and Cloud enable IT services to be consumed in the same way. So, Cloud will grow and drive pervasive growth of data centres.
Datacloud: What regions within Africa do you see as primed for IT asset expansion?
The consumption Axes are South/Southern Africa, East Africa with Ethiopia emerging as a significant country, Egypt/Morocco in the north, and West Africa, with Nigeria being a significant driver for scale having a positive ecosystem growth effect on the West Africa region.
The scale and growth of fibre capacity on the Atlantic coast of Africa will be a key scale driver.
As a truly carrier neutral company, every undersea cable is connected to Rack Centre and we are seeing this effect as every country on the Atlantic coast of Africa is connected, with direct peering capability to South Africa.
Datacloud: What is one of your goals for the next year and how do you expect to achieve it?
Continue to grow our comprehensive carrier and content ecosystem which has a great momentum to it right now and to get our 1.5MW of capacity in place, on trajectory to achieving about 10MW at our current location and other locations in Nigeria.
Datacloud: How can our sector help to improve society?
Provide the platform for cost and energy effective provision of services that underpin transformation in provision of e-enable healthcare, education and economic development.
Africa has a great opportunity to leap frog advanced economies, and we have the demographics and a determined youth to enable this, and we will play our role as an industry.
Ayotunde & Rack Centre will be at the Datacloud Africa 2019 Leadership Summit in Accra 26th September 2019 – Meet them there
