As the expansion of data centres across SA accelerates, global software giant Oracle will formally announce tomorrow that it has chosen Johannesburg as the site of its first data centre in Africa.
The company's CEO and founder, Larry Ellison, said two years ago that SA would become the company's first "cloud region" in Africa.
"The South Africa cloud region is part of Oracle's strategy to meet customers where they are, enabling customers to keep data and services where they need it," said Regis Louis, Oracle vice-president for cloud strategy in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Oracle has been in SA for three decades.
"All of our regions support every service and feature, and are available to customers anywhere in the world," Louis said.
"Companies are realising that reliance on a single cloud-infrastructure provider is neither wise nor practical. Oracle has introduced several hundred new cloud services and features and is continuing to see organisations in South Africa turn to Oracle to run their most mission-critical workloads in the cloud."
Louis said the company sees similar urgency in SA as in Europe and Middle East countries to drive transformation, and a similar need for more business agility, cost reduction and data security.
"This is why we are building a data region in South Africa with the exact same characteristics as any other data region that we build around the world, as we are trying to address similar problems."
Louis pointed to a recent study by research firm International Data Corp (IDC) that said cloud reliance in SA accelerated last year as companies extended enterprise applications to remote workers and transformed the associated business processes.
Jon Tullett, senior research manager for IT services in Sub-Saharan Africa at the IDC, said Johannesburg was a natural location for the new facility.
"Johannesburg has by far the biggest data centre industry, with the associated expertise, resources, and supply chains as well," he said.
"Cape Town is more typically a secondary data centre location, unless a company has an existing primary technical facility there. Amazon Web Services (AWS), of course, is an example of the latter - it's operated a technical centre in Cape Town for many years. In Oracle's case, it would have also considered proximity to large customers, and Johannesburg has more of those, too."
Tullett said SA is part of a global strategy for Oracle.
"[It] offers a mix of cloud technologies . from software to hardware to service, and many of their solutions do benefit from having infrastructure based locally. The company has an aggressive rollout plan for new data centres worldwide - it's a go-to-market strategy they're executing on, and South Africa is a step on that road map."
Tullett does not believe the data centre market is saturated despite substantial investment in the sector. In the past three years, AWS has built two major facilities in Cape Town, Microsoft has built Azure data centres in Cape Town and Johannesburg, Teraco has unveiled the largest data centre in Africa, and Huawei has opened one in Johannesburg.
"It makes the market more competitive, and will also contribute to the growth of cloud adoption, partnerships and, very importantly, skills development," said Tullett.
"In the past we might have expressed caution about saturation, but in the last couple of years there has been a steady growth of enterprise customers . Investments like this are likely to make the pie bigger for everyone, for at least the next few years."
Teraco Data Environments, Africa's largest vendor-neutral data centre provider, announced on Thursday that its Cape Town 2 hyperscale data centre had been completed in Brackenfell.
It is the first of two phases, which Teraco CEO Jan Hnizdo said would benefit from Cape Town being one of Africa's most digitally connected cities.
Aside from being home to numerous digitally connected enterprises, the city is near the landing sites of most major subsea cable systems serving the region.
Next year Google's Equiano cable will enter service, followed a year later by the high-capacity 2Africa cable, both landing near Cape Town.
Teraco's new data centre is the biggest independent facility of its kind in the Western Cape, Hnizdo said.
"Now, enterprises have the ability of large-scale deployment through a third party and to deploy their own infrastructure in a highly available facility, built to hyperscale specifications. In terms of our installed capacity, it's a 20% increase."
Teraco is currently completing a Johannesburg data centre, Joburg 4, which will be similar in size to the new Cape Town facility. Hnizdo believes that Oracle's data centre will play a complementary role, rather than competing with Teraco.
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