By 
By Oluwatobi Opusunju and Chinedu James
Rack Centre foresees rapid expansion into new locations across Nigeria and other countries in Africa as the Tier III data centre ramps up its portfolio of services to an increasing list of clients. Managing Director Mr. Ayotunde Coker told IT Edge News in a recent interview in Lagos that the company was already considering expanding to other locations within the country and elsewhere in West Africa as Rack Centre has experienced an impressive growth trajectory built on its ability to always exceed the expectations of its teeming customers.
“We are geared up to being able to scale our capacity on demand to the single highest location here …. Although we see us exceeding our scaling at this location, we are very seriously now looking at our expansion in different key locations in the country like Abuja. We are also looking at how we could expand elsewhere in West Africa on the trajectory of us looking at how we could grow to African major countries as a data centre company,” said Coker.
Rack Centre is the first carrier neutral collocation provider in Africa to be certified by the Uptime Institute, the US based professional services organization focused on improving the performance, efficiency, and reliability of business critical infrastructure. The Uptime Institute is the IT industry’s most trusted and adopted global standard for the proper design, build and operation of data centres.
Adjudged as the leading data centre provider in Africa, Rack Centre has fostered an ecosystem of carriers that provide data connectivity. The data centre is a hub to major mobile network operators, all major carriers and major ISPs – to give it a technical and selling edge over rivals.
It’s ‘Cloud on Ground’ service is a new market brand for cloud services that offers users a pay-as-you-go channel for what Coker called Africa’s huge “addressable market.” He said the goal is to get the market enlightened enough to realize what ‘Cloud on Ground’ service offers in a way that will ultimately alter the dynamics of how businesses engage infrastructure without having to unnecessarily own or invest in them.
His words: “The key challenge is getting through the message to unlock that addressable market which is significant and there is no reason why we are not able to deliver these services to the whole of West and Central Africa that are parts of sub-Saharan Africa from Rack Centre here. We are the most connected Tier III data centre in Africa; the research shows it. It is also about the value we give to our customers. In the cloud ecosystem, we are so interconnected to the whole world, we can actually make cloud services available elsewhere in the world for consumption at Rack Centre with our customers’ data that is held here.”
Gearing up for more more locations
“Every single country from the Atlantic coast of Africa is directly connected to Rack Centre by fibre. Even within low latency of 50 milliseconds, we connect countries of population of over 500 million people. That is why we are the leading data centre and it’s backed by fact, not a matter of opinion. We have a great customer base, local and international leading players. Since October 2013 we have operated without a second of downtime which is something we worked hard to achieve and we are proud of. So we have grown in a variety of dimensions,” said Coker to the IT Edge News.
According to Coker, the data centre remains committed to improving technological competencies in the region even as plans are underway for the establishment of data centres across different locations in Africa. For now, Rack Centre’s primary presence is in Lagos.
“We have West African customers in here at Rack Centre because we deliver services from here to other countries in West Africa but we do see the benefit of other countries in West Africa which is something that we are actively looking at.
“Many of our customers want us to have another location because they will like to anchor the relationship with Rack Centre.
“As the demand for hosting services grow, we will put in a data centre at the point of consumption in more areas than just Lagos that has a virtual business benefit which we see right now and we are working on,” added Coker.
