Earlier this year Equinix, the global interconnection and data centre company, and Oman Telecommunications Company (Omantel), announced a joint venture to develop a new network-dense data centre that will be located in Barka, near Muscat.
This joint venture will establish the first world-class, carrier-neutral hub in Oman where carriers, content providers and cloud providers co-locate critical IT infrastructure, supporting traffic growth in MENA.
Oman is strategically positioned between Asia, Africa and Europe, and the new Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre will create a regional interconnection hub with ultra-low latencies between global business markets.
Jeroen Schlosser, Managing Director, Equinix MENA, said: “We see significant potential for Oman as a market generally and, in particular, supporting CLS requirements as subsea cable momentum accelerates. It’s all about meeting the growing need for interconnection – private data exchange between businesses.
“The new IBX data centre in Oman will benefit from connectivity to strategic cable landing stations (CLS) and subsea cable systems that terminate directly inside the facility. It will also benefit from the investments by Omantel in multiple strategic subsea cable systems throughout the region and world.
“This subsea cable connectivity will provide customers with significant cost savings and an increase in performance and security.
“There is a huge highway to Asia Pacific, a huge highway to Europe, and people can use that place as a landing spot to feed all the different businesses that they have in the Middle East region. And predominantly we would see carriers, content providers, and cloud providers using that space.
“The value in Oman for us is that it lands all those international highways, the big Internet backbones into Europe and Asia, that is the value for the region.”
The company first set-up in Dubai as a starting place for doing business in the Middle East before expanding as opportunities in the region increased. Based on demand and requirements, customers in the GCC and wider MENA region can also leverage other Equinix data centres in the region for dual access to content providers, allowing carriers, content providers and cloud providers to further build resilience into their IT and network infrastructure. This subsea cable connectivity will provide customers with significant cost savings and an increase in performance and security.
“In the digital age, companies need to reach everywhere, interconnect everyone and integrate everything, and they need to do it out at the digital edge, where commerce, population centres and digital ecosystems meet. Our joint venture with Omantel will do exactly that,” said Schlosser.
Schlosser added: “We give our customers a true global interconnection platform so if I’m an enterprise and operate in four or five different cities then in the past I probably needed to have four or five mini-data centres and in all those locations needed to build skills and hardware and organisations to maintain that.
“If you go to Equinix you now go on to our global platform and you can meet your IT providers, cloud providers and service providers in our data centres and from behind one desk manage all of those locations.
“We work with our customers to make sure that in all those locations people have the same quality of services, the same secure access, the same performance and the same data compliance all over the world and that is the benefit of working with Equinix. It’s a single provider that offers you global consistency.”
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