Prefabricated Modular Data Centers Have Huge Potential In Africa

I've talked to a lot of aspiring sub-Saharan African entrepreneurs. I always whisper the same thing in their ears: prefabricated modular data centers!!!

Why? Because most of Africa doesn't have carrier neutral telecom hotels or data centers. For example, Sierra Leone's government keeps its 'sovereign data' at Dallas Equinix of all places. There is no genuine colo provider in the poor African state. Now one of the greatest advantages in business is to be first. Large swathes of Africa have no multi-tenant buildings for storing data or as interconnection points for the mobile providers, carriers and ISPs. So If you can build a small data center in a region that has none, your project is likely to attract sufficient customers to be successful. The key point is that you need to create a professional data center that is quite small because the initial market is limited, but can be scaled as the market grows. Most areas can only initially support one small data center. Hence once the facility goes live, there is simply not enough demand to support a competitor. So it becomes at least short term a natural monopoly due to the limited size of the market. But to be truly successful long term, you must find a way to scale your DC as the value of any carrier neutral facility is proportional to the number of clients. Indeed, it is always the customers that make the data center. The sales pitch to local customers is quite simple: a robust environment for their equipment and a place to interconnect with the rest of the local telecom ecosystem. Just having back up power and proper cooling are big deals. The possibility of an Internet exchange will be also exciting to potential clients.

Everyone needs to be at Marseille Interxion or Ashburn Equinix or Telehouse London because everyone is there! The Equinix approach is to enter a new promising market early and quickly achieve a critical mass of clients so that its facility becomes or is perceived to be essential to most networks or sufficient for their connectivity needs. In Lisbon, Equinix took an old building, renovated it, got important cables like Equiano to place their submarine line termination equipment in it, and overnight LS1 became the most important Portuguese data center. In turn, all recent subsea cables landing in Portugal have also put their electronics in LS1 including 2Africa. So any potential customer looking for colocation will view LS1 as one stop shopping. LS1 is necessary and sufficient. Below is a South African modular data center.