First Brick Holdings has announced that it is establishing and investing in ‘Raxio Ethiopia’, which will build and operate the first state-of-the-art, privately owned data centre in the east African country.
In line with First Brick’s first data centre facility in Uganda, Raxio Uganda, the new data centre will be constructed and operated as a Tier III standard facility, serving the large demand for high-quality co-location data centre services in Ethiopia.
The announcement comes as the telecoms sector in Ethiopia becomes increasingly liberalised, with recent regulatory changes designed to enable broader technology access and encourage the development of technology infrastructure. This reflects the regional trend of increased demand for high quality environments for local storage, business critical systems and data hosting solutions, such as local cloud services, as well as the need for external data recovery sites for business continuity.
The key target industries for Raxio Ethiopia will be financial services, cloud service providers, IT companies, media companies, local and regional enterprises, and content delivery networks. As the telecom sector opens up, new carriers and Internet service providers will join to create a new hub of connectivity in the country.
The data centre will meet the uptime, redundancy and maintainability requirements established under the Tier III standard. The facility will also adhere to the principle of neutrality, both for carriers and ISPs as new players begin to enter the Ethiopian market, and for cloud service providers, that will be able to operate freely from within the data centre.
Raxio Ethiopia will offer data centre colocation services where customers can house their computing, networking, storage and critical IT infrastructure in an optimally operated and secure environment. By co-locating in Raxio’s facility, customers will benefit from a ‘shared infrastructure’ model, and substantially reduce their operational and capital costs while improving application performance and flexibility.
Raxio will also supplement its core colocation offering with several additional services, including cross connection and remote hands.
Robert Mullins, Executive Director at First Brick Holdings, said: “Recent ICT and regulatory trends in Ethiopia mark it out as an ideal location for high-quality co-location data centre services.
“The government has embarked on a process that will lead to a broader liberalisation of the telecom sector where new operators will be allowed to enter the market, and there is also a large opportunity for the numerous local, regional and international cloud services providers seek adequate facilities in-country from where they can provide their services.
“We believe Raxio Ethiopia will have a transformational effect on the Ethiopian digital economy by providing a critical and missing part of digital infrastructure in the country.
“The state-of-the-art facility will enable Ethiopian companies to operate more effectively locally, to compete in a regional and global context and will provide an environment where new companies focused on the digital economy can thrive.
“It will have significant knock-on effects, creating opportunities for technology-savvy employment and broader technological exchange.”
Robert Mullins participated in a panel at the Datacloud Africa Leadership Summit in Ghana on September 26, in which he will be discussing key trends for data centre and communications infrastructure investment for Africa.
