climate and comms

Building data centres in Africa is increasingly starting to grab the industry’s attention.   What are the key issues that are influencing the growth of data centre’s in Africa? The data centre industry continues to thrive globally and the big players are still seeing strong growth in mature markets and hence they have little incentive to start looking at smaller data centre’s in what is still perceived to be a high-risk market.   The players who are getting into Africa are going to be ‘specialists’ who see the niche and want to get a foothold early.   Not that there is going to be a shortage of opportunity as the installed base in Africa is still miniscule. The quality and nature of that installed base is variable with very few Tier 3 let alone Tier 4 data centre’s and many are in-house telco data centre’s.     Carrier neutral colocation data centre’s are few and far between.   There-in lies the opportunity.   There is more than suf...

The African data centre market consists primarily of in-house data centres built by banks, Telco’s and Governments for their own use.   This has been a function of the lack of availability of carrier neutral data centres.   However this is changing with the advent of companies like Teraco which are building World Class Tier 3 + data centres which use the latest technologies for managing power and cooling.   The power and cooling requirements of new technology servers and high density suites is leading to many legacy data centre facilities being unable to deliver the energy efficiency benefits of a new purpose-built facilities.    The operating costs of older data centres are thus becoming increasingly prohibitive with the life time cost of power exceeding the cost of building a new data centre. The increased requirement for digital and physical security has lead corporations to seek better and ultimately cheaper solutions by going outs...

After two days of data centre conferencing in Monaco what emerges is consensus about a few things.    The imminent impact of the Internet of Things, outsourcing, virtualization, Colocation and the ongoing migration to the Cloud,   but also the awareness that there exists a massive shortage of data centre capacity in Africa and the urgent need to address it.    There is more data centre capacity within the M25 of London than on the whole continent of Africa. However, where there is some disagreement is exactly how to go about it.   Where to build?   Who to build?   How to build?   Who to finance?     Doing business in Africa is not easy.   But we are inspired by JFK–– “ We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard ".       Africa is hardly the moon but to some people it might as well be! Power, that ever present bogeyman, seemingly presents one of our b...

The mobile operators have been the ‘unicorns’ of Africa for the last 20 years.    Consistently outperforming, not only their global peers, but also all other sectors in Africa – even resources.    Historically African MNO’s have enjoyed higher EBITDA margins than their developed market peers – but it seems the African mobile fairy tale is coming to an end as we approach the bewitching hour of midnight.   The nasty sisters of MTN’s Nigerian Cinderella have reared their ugly heads with the imposition of a punitive $5.2bn fine.     Like Apple, whose once unstoppable iPhone sales have started to slow, most African MNO’s   need to come up with something new and smart or risk marginalisation as demand slows.     The killer App in Africa to date has been voice – but this market is saturated now with   customers from the very bottom of the pyramid – and so voice ARPU’s have declined.    According...

Dambiso Moyo argues that “ limitless development assistance to African governments, has fostered dependency, encouraged corruption and ultimately perpetuated poor governance and poverty” [1] .     It is self evident that sustainable development has not taken off despite the billions in foreign aid to African Governments over the last 60 odd years since the end of the colonial era.     Having eliminated aid as being a non-starter for African development the challenge now is to find the magic formula.     What key attributes, artefacts, behaviours or mechanisms will have the highest impact?      It is a highly complex web of factors and interdependencies that will lead to a sustainable future.    Issues like improved governance, the rule of law, better education,   better health care,   greater FDI,   trade,   even climate change will all be key factors that will impact the future ...

New life has started to bloom across this drought-ridden continent.     These green shoots are the fruit of the last decade and a half of increasingly feverish activity.     Democracy and mining spring to mind, but what about retail?   What about banking?   And of course mobile – the great enabler ! Chinese colonization proceeds with alacrity while their Global counterparts dawdle.    But is Sino capital and labour what Africa really needs?   Yes – but only if there is no alternative.    The rest of the World, suffering from post 2008 crisis lethargy, is slowly starting to realize that Africa should form part of their longer term plans.   The UK chugs along barely in positive territory while Osborn pats himself on the back for having squeezed the life out of the UK which he now kicks down the road and calls it growth !    The Tea Party almost dragged the USA (and the World) to the brink of an economic moras...