Friday, 27 June 2008

Asia’s Leading Data Centres Sign MOU to Form Alliance

Four of South East Asia’s leading data centres have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to form a Data Centre Alliance to meet acute data centre requirements in the region.

The alliance between Singapore’s 1-Net Singapore, Malaysia’s The AIMS Asia Group, Vietnam’s CMC Telecom and Thailand’s TCC Technology (TCCT) aim to form a one-stop Hub that provides a full suite of services and connectivity.

The focal point of this Alliance is to create network and systems interoperability while allowing peering between all its data centres to enable seamless transfer of data and digital media for enterprises.

It will also offer value added managed services such as Digital Asset Management and delivery systems. Through the Alliance, customers can easily set up complementary and alternative disaster recovery sites across borders. The objective is to ensure enterprise customers can gain easy access to the same high level of service at every data centre within the Alliance.

Other priorities of the Alliance include working towards jointly developing technologies and promoting adoption of industry standards among its members such as a Green Data Centre initiative to drive energy efficient processes and standards.

Upon signing the MOU, members of the Alliance will move towards definitive agreements between the parties, common Service Level Agreements (SLA) and establish peering between the data centres so as to start operations by end of 2008.

Driven by sharp growth in IT services in Asia, the data centre services market is experiencing colossal demand. In Singapore alone, according to an IDC Market Analysis Report, the market size for data centre services is estimated to be US in 2007 and is forecasted to reach US in 2011 at a CAGR of 7%.


“IDA welcomes the formation of the data centre alliance as this is in line with our efforts under our Digital Marketplace programme (DMP) to establish a trusted and conducive environment for digital media businesses to securely host, manage and trade digital media assets,” said Ms Tham Ai Chyn, Assistant Chief Executive, Industry and Cluster Development, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore.

“Furthermore, we are encouraged to see the alliance focusing on promoting industry best practices and standards as this also aligns well with our efforts to establish best practices and technical standard guidelines to facilitate international digital media asset exchange and trade.”

With a combined space of more than 500,000 square feet and a projected annual turnover of SGD100 million by 2009, the Alliance is set to become one of the biggest data centre operators in the region catered for first-tier telcos, government agencies, banks and other businesses.