CSF has aggressive plans to expand its footprint in Asia, and to turn
the ASEAN region into a major data center hub
With growing economies and a
youth culture increasingly adopting mobile technologies, countries in South
East Asia hold much promise for the data center industry, according to Wong Ka
Vin, managing director of CSF Asia, a company with ambitious data center plans
for the region.
Speaking with FOCUS the day
before a presentation at DatacenterDynamics Converged Singapore, he said CSF
wants to create a new data center hub for the region, capitalizing on the
growth of Singapore and a gap in the market that no large players have yet
filled.
“ASEAN (the Association of South
East Asian Nations) is becoming more and more the economic hub of Asia,” Wong
said.
“It balances out the developed
economies of Japan and Korea and the workhorse of China. I call the south the
new Asia – it is the young blood.”
Wong said while large players
have started entering the market with colocation facilities, few have entered –
with the exception of players in Singapore - with sizable scale. This is where
CSF believes the sweet spot for the Malaysia-based operator – which already has
three very large facilities in that country – exists.
“If you analyse the data center
industry in Asia Pacific [you will find] there is no single player. That is
ubiquitous across South Asia. You get your super big guys in each country, but
when they start to go out as a data center operator, because investments are so
heavy, they don’t are not that big,” Wong said.
He said it is only recently that
large telcos have really started showing interest, with NTT starting to invest
heavily in the region and Singtel, which has a very large presence. Bu CSF’s
offering, which is also attracted telecommunications players that see the
benefit in colocation, is in approaching these markets with a “truly ASEAN
brand”.
Building out in ASEAN
CSF group started by building
computer rooms and Wong joined the company two years ago after working with
Equinix on its Asian growth to develop data centers in Indonesia, Thailand and
Singapore, that will capitalize on the success of Singapore.
His aim is to build on the
success of Singapore – a country with strong fiber connections - as a data
center hub, extending the boundaries of this to include the entire ASEAN region
though local partnerships where required.
“I see the value of having
infrastructure the can be unified across multiple geographies,” Wong said.
CSF first started in Kuala Lumpur
and is listed on the London Stock Exchange.
It recently went live with a
200,000 sq ft, eight storey data center in Jakarta called Cyber-CSF which runs
a data center called CXJ that has 100,000 sq ft of whitespace that it hopes
will be on day Tier III certified.
It partnered with local property
developer for CXJ, and is using the concerns about the country’s reliability of
power supply as a plus, building a data center Wong said will have its own
substation.
He said by not relying 100% on
the grid, the colocation sales pitch for CSF is made even stronger in this
emerging market. Already the data center has become populated with the
operations of telecommunications and financial services players.
Wong said the Jakarta market for
data centres has grown as the use of Internet has taken off in the country.
“Indonesia is now the darling of
most investors, US and Europe, and I believe the economy has strengthened after
the Asian financial crisis back in 1998/1999. If you look at where it is
heading, they have what you call a uniquely very Indonesian way of doing
business. They deregulated a bit of the internal network and as a result, a
year and a half ago, there was a significant shift in internet pricing and that
led to lots of users connecting into the network,” Wong said, adding that
Jarkata also has strong fiber connections throughout the city.
Growth plans
CSF Group has also acquired space
in Singapore to build another data center of the same size as the Jarkarta
build, but with not so many storeys. This will also be a greenfield build using
a modular design similar to CXJ and will go live in Q3, 2014.
And it is currently in talks with
a partner in Bangkok, Thailand, to build a similar facility there.
“Adjacent data centers and
connecting data centres is crucial today,” Wong said, adding that this approach
goes further than pure redundancy.
“If you look at the evolving cloud
technology that is coming in, cloud needs the kind of infrastructure we are
talking about. For it to work it needs the data center to be highly connected,
not just incidentally – we are talking gigabits of connection between data
centres,” Wong said.
“This is a nice way of developing
a business that will create sustainable value in what we do.”
Wong Ka Vin, managing director of
CSF Asia, will be presenting more on his ASEAN goals and the regions challenges
at DatacenterDynamics Converged Singapore, which starts tomorrow, at the Marina
Bay Sands.
Penny Jones
Business & Investment Opportunities
YourVietnamExpert is a division of Saigon Business Corporation Pte Ltd, Incorporated in Singapore since 1994. As Your Business Companion, we propose a range of services in Strategy, Investment and Management, focusing Healthcare and Life Science with expertise in ASEAN. Since we are currently changing the platform of www.yourvietnamexpert.com, you may contact us at: sbc.pte@gmail.com, provisionally. Many thanks.
No comments:
Post a Comment