3 ways the data centre impacts growth

Article by: Xavier Lau, Director, Enterprise Sales, Northeast Asia at CommScope

The data centre market in Asia Pacific is expected to be $32 billion by 2022 – and Hong Kong is paying attention. The local government is looking to beef up its regional data centre hub given the city’s proximity to mainland China and access to multi-national companies.

You may be surprised to learn “IT modernisation” makes me excited. But it’s really about what the term stands for: economic growth, entrepreneurial opportunity and frugal innovation.

What comes to mind when you think of data centre modernisation? I’m always challenging my peers to re-imagine the possibilities. Here are three ways modernising the data centre could impact growth:

Drive economic growth: Modernising IT could boost a company’s revenue by up to 14 percent while cutting costs by more than 13 percent, according to a report by Avanade which polled 800 IT professionals. Chinese players Tencent and Alibaba see this opportunity and are expanding their Hong Kong data centre footprint while Microsoft has a sizeable local deployment with NTT.

Ignite entrepreneurial opportunities: More than $5 billion went to financial technology funding in Asia last year, and the majority went to China, according to the South China Morning Post. This industry is spurring regional development of cloud computing as companies can quickly add capacity while eliminating lost opportunities due to resource constraints.

Frugal innovation: The challenge for Hong Kong is to evolve from one of the world’s foremost financial hubs to an innovative powerhouse. It’s no surprise there’s a scarcity of land and existing data centre infrastructure needs a major upgrade. Given the increased need for extra capacity, data centre managers must quickly move from 10Gb/s and 40Gb/s to 100Gb/s, 400Gb/s and beyond. CommScope recently hosted a forum with customers and partners on how we’re bridging the gap for data centre infrastructure between today and the future. Check out the video here.