Data is Nigeria’s New Goldmine- Coker, Rack Centre Boss

ICT and in fact data is key to firing the kiln of production and holds new grounds for Nigeria to boost her economy, according to Mr. Tunde Coker, managing director, Rack Centre.

Rack Centre is regarded as the West Africa’s premium data centre with a state-of-the-art, Tier III Design Certified data centre offering carrier-neutral colocation services.

The centre has over 6,000 sqm (65,000sqft) of energy efficient and secure data centre space.

Coker who received a delegation of Nigeria CommunicationsWeek on tour of Rack Centre facility, said that the data market will continue to exhibit strong momentum as businesses accelerate their transformation into data-driven companies.

The growth is driving strong on big data-related infrastructure, software, and services.

He made reference to an International Data Corporation (IDC) report in 2015 that foresees the big data technology and services market growing at a compound annual growth rate of 23.1% over the 2014-2019 forecast period with annual spending reaching $48.6 billion in 2019.

According to Coker, Rack Centre has keyed into the data hosting space and carrier of carriers; positioning Nigeria to become the West Africa’s hub.

He told the Nigeria CommunicationsWeek’s team that, “The technology we have invested in provides clients guaranteed levels of uptime, power and service availability. Co-locating within Rack Centre allows companies to avoid fixed infrastructure investments and to leave the growing complexity of managing power and environmental issues to specialists”.

Rack Centre is a member of Jagal Investments. It is 100% owned by Jagal, a Nigerian conglomerate holding that operates leading energy businesses and manages a diverse portfolio of investments.

Only recently, an IDC report, observed that all three major big data submarkets – infrastructure, software, and services – are expected to grow over the next five years.

Infrastructure, which consists of computing, networking, storage infrastructure, and other datacenter infrastructure-like security – will grow at a 21.7% CAGR.

This, Coker said, forms Rack Centre’s visionary projects seated in the Lagos, the commercial hub of West Africa.

Coker who acknowledged that the availability and skill level of IT and analytics talent will also have a direct impact on the market, added that 98% of Rack Centre Staff are home grown while the expatriates are there for knowledge transfer.

He noted that economic drivers, barriers, and potential benefits from deploying big data initiatives vary from industry to industry, these efforts are primarily focused on delivering a better customer experience, supporting product and service innovation, and optimizing business processes.

He however believes that the current business climate will help Nigerians- both private and public entities fancy local hosting of their data as common issues for hosting data abroad include security and privacy concerns as well as the related challenges of collecting, using, and managing customers' personal data; source of foreign exchange and inadequate customer service.

He expressed Rack Centre’s continued drive to invest on the project with expansion plans in the offing.

Rack Centre’s laurels includes: the only colocation data centre company in Africa recognised for Innovation, Leadership and Best Practice in the global data centre industry as finalist in the Data Centre Dynamics Awards, Modular Deployment category for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Region for 2014; the premier Tier III Design Certified data centre in West Africa.

The Centre was also won the ICT Infrastructure Company of the Year during Beacon of ICT awards 2015 organised by CommunicationsWeek, Nigeria’s leading Information, Communication and Technology [ICT] Publication.

Rack Centre also won the 2015 Data Centre Dynamics Award for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region in the Data Centre Impact Award Category area.

This was the first time a company in Africa has won the Data Centre Dynamics award for Europe, Middle East and Africa.