eCompany plans to add new data centres in 2007

UAE-BASED IT services provider eCompany is planning to build two multi-million dollar data centres in the next year to cope with increased demand from the market.

The centres will be located in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and eCompany -- Etisalat’s IT division -- has scheduled them for completion between the second and fourth quarters of next year. “One is coming up early next year around March or April in Dubai. The second one will most likely be towards the end of next year and that will be in Abu Dhabi,” Amir Rashid, Etisalat business development manager, told IT Weekly.

Rashid would not disclose exactly how much investment was going in to building the data centres, but did reveal that each of the centres would cost “tens of millions of dollars”.

He explained that the expansion was necessary because of how much eCompany’s business had grown over the last few years.

“During the last three years we have really seen a surge in demand for outsourcing and a trend where much bigger organisations are pretty much outsourcing everything from disaster recovery to other infrastructure management requirements,” noted Rashid.

“In terms of financial growth, for the last three years we are more than doubling each year, and in terms of number of customers, maybe around 25-30% growth,” he said, adding that eCompany currently has around 250 customers.

Rashid said that eCompany’s new facilities would offer the same services which are currently available from the three data centres it already operates in the UAE, which focus on infrastructure outsourcing.

“Right now we are offering infrastructure outsourcing such as the hosting and managing of customers’ equipment. We also provide them with bandwidth, the security around it, and managed services such as load balancing, storage on demand, tape backups, 24/7 monitoring, and disaster recovery,” Rashid told IT Weekly.