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By Chinenye Anuforo, [email protected]
Months after acquiring MainOne, Equinix, global digital infrastructure company, has disclosed its plans of expansion for the Nigerian and West African markets.
The company said the plans were designed to augment its long-term strategy to become a leading African carrier-neutral digital infrastructure company.
Speaking to newsmen in Lagos, the general manager, Nigeria sales at MainOne, Bunmi Ogun, said MainOne would be partnering AMSIX to deploy leading global Internet exchange presence in Lagos, which would increase local peering of traffic in Nigeria.
“It will also extend Equinix fibre to Lagos, to enable interconnection of Lagos data centres with Equinix data centres globally, while using AfriConnect Service offering to bring new content providers to West Africa,” Ogun said.
Presenting the Equinix 2022 Global Tech Trends Survey, the director, digital transformation and GTM strategy at Equinix, Mr. Matt George, said over half of businesses in Nigeria were already planning to expand locally, despite supply chain, cybersecurity and recruitment challenges.
He said, as part of the survey, 100 business leaders in Nigeria were interviewed about the opportunities and challenges their organisations were facing, and their plans for the future.
The data revealed that there are huge opportunities for Nigeria’s businesses to successfully expand into new markets and reach new customers.
According to the report, 54 per cent of respondents were planning on expanding in an existing country in the next 12 months, 34 per cent into a new region and 33 per cent into a new country, while 93 per cent of information technology (IT) leaders in Nigeria said enhancing customer experience remained a priority for them.
However, a number of potentially limiting factors were identified by businesses when it came to global growth, including concerns and challenges in supply chain, cyber security, and staff retention and recruitment.
The managing director, MainOne, an Equinix company, Funke Opeke, said: “The acceleration in digital transformation in Nigeria reinforces the need for businesses to have access to single points to interconnect locally. Increased speed of connectivity, increased flexibility of connectivity and reduced cost of connectivity were identified by IT decision-makers in Nigeria as the most beneficial aspects of interconnection.
“MainOne provides a rich interconnection ecosystem that allows customers connect to each other, multiple telecoms networks, and Cloud, payment and content providers in a single location,” she added.
To help grow their businesses, 77 per cent of IT leaders in Nigeria said they plan to move more business functions to the cloud including business-critical applications and security functions. Forty per cent in Nigeria said they plan to facilitate global expansion plans by deploying virtually via the cloud, with over a quarter (26 per cent) – 21 per cent among IT decision-makers in Nigeria – doing so using a bare metal solution.
Meanwhile, 47 per cent globally (46 per cent in Nigeria) said they expect increased spending on carrier-neutral colocation solutions to facilitate the planned rise in digital deployments, while even more (59 per cent at global level, 70 per cent in Nigeria) said they intend to increase investment in interconnection services as they plan to progress digital transformation and build resilience.
