AIMS joins Asia’s Leading Data Centres in forming Data Centre Alliance

Kuala Lumpur, 18 June 2008 - Four of South East Asia’s leading data centres namely Malaysia’s The AIMS Asia Group, Singapore’s 1-Net Singapore, Vietnam’s CMC Telecom and Thailand’s TCC Technology (TCCT) announced today the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to form a Data Centre Alliance to meet acute data centre requirements in the region. Together, the data centres within the Alliance will form a one-stop Hub that provides a full suite of services and connectivity.

With a combined space of more than 500,000 square feet and a projected annual turnover of approximately RM240 million by 2009, the Alliance will become one of the biggest data centre operators in the region catered for first-tier telcos, government agencies, banks and other businesses.

The focal point of this Alliance is to create network and systems interoperability while allowing peering between all its data centres to enable seamless transfer of data and digital media for enterprises. It will also offer value added managed services such as Digital Asset Management and delivery systems. Through the Alliance, customers can easily set up complementary and alternative disaster recovery sites across borders. The objective is to ensure enterprise customers can gain easy access to the same high level of service at every data centre within the Alliance.

Upon signing the MOU, members of the Alliance will move towards definitive agreements between the parties, common Service Level Agreements (SLA) and establish peering between the data centres so as to start operations by end of 2008.

Other priorities of the Alliance include working towards jointly developing technologies and promoting adoption of industry standards among its members such as a Green Data Centre initiative to drive energy efficient processes and standards.

Unlike other data centres, this four-country Alliance extends a unique advantage of providing regional value added services while understanding and serving local customer needs. Enterprises can expect to reap full benefits at each of the data centres under the Alliance including best practices, high reliability and security.

The data centres within the Alliance will meet Tier III and above standards as stated by the Data Centre Tier Classification from Uptime Institute. They will also be using ISO27001 as reference for the information security management system (ISMS), a quality management system (QMS) as per ISO9001 and an ISO20000 reference for IT Service Management Standard.

Driven by sharp growth in IT services in Asia, the data centre services market is experiencing colossal demand. According to IDC’s report entitled “Malaysia Datacentre Services 2007 - 2011 Forecast and Analysis”, the market size for data centre services is forecast to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.03% from 2006 to 2010. Specifically, the Internet datacenter market is forecast to increase at a CAGR of 11.58% from US$22.9 million in 2006 to US$39.6 million in 2010, whereas the enterprise datacenter market is expected to increase at a higher CAGR of 15.77% from US$98.9 million in 2006 to US$205.7 million in 2011.

“The formation of this Alliance will allow for borderless connectivity across the region and open up opportunities for our collective customer base to access a wider market. As an operator of carrier neutral data centres focused in growing interconnectivity between service providers, AIMS’ participation in this Alliance will now enable seamless convergence amongst service providers,” said Mr. Gan Te-Shen, Group CEO of The AIMS Asia Group.

“1-Net Singapore is proud to be a member of this Alliance with such established partners in the region. We see this Alliance as an opportunity to extend our services by providing a comprehensive suite of regional DC solutions to meet the regional business needs of our customers. We are excited to integrate our strengths with our partners’ and create significantly more energy efficient, secured and reliable cross border data centre services," said Mr. Yow Tau Keon, Managing Director, 1-Net Singapore.

“The Alliance not only expands each member’s influence in the data centre services market of the region but also brings customer’s satisfaction to the highest level by the cross-border interconnected data centres, exchanged technologies and quality of services. As one of the first and largest Neutral-carrier Data Services Provider in Vietnam, CMC Telecom see such fascinating project as part of our Data Centre Global Supply Chain strategy,” said Mr. Pham Anh Chien, Chief Executive Officer of CMC Telecom.

“Going forward, TCCT anticipates healthy growth of data centres in multinational market. Even with our well-known position as Thailand’s leading carrier neutral data centre provider with high level of trust from our oversea clients, TCCT aims to thoroughly strategize the collaboration with our Data Centre Partners in Asia to proactively build the strong Data Centre Regional Networking Community to exchange and enrich Data Centre Knowledge via this Alliance Program. The synergy among our partners in this region will also enable our clients’ mission critical business to better manage their risk via the Cross Border Alternative Disaster Recovery Sites Project,” said Mr. Kosit Suksingha, Managing Director of TCCT.