AIMS: High power cost remains biggest challenge
PROACTIVE MOVE NEEDED: Firm urges government to recognise data services industry as key aspect in digital economic push
HIGH cost of power will continue to be the pain point for the data services industry if the government does not take a proactive move, said Southeast Asia’s carrier-neutral data services provider AIMS Group.
“Unless we see the government taking a proactive move, this will remain our biggest challenge. Power makes up 40 per cent of our operating costs, and what we’ve noticed is that, as more data is consumed, power consumption increases,” said AIMS Group chief executive officer Chiew Kok Hin in its review for this year and outlook for next year.
“While we hope the government will look into recognising the industry as an important aspect of its push for a digital economy, we are taking measures on our side as well. AIMS’s green technology investments will make power consumption more efficient. Further to that we are using infrastructure that can handle higher temperature,” he added.
Chew said in the last two years, the industry had seen data centre players going bust due to mismanagement and oversupply of space that lead to a price war.
At the start of the Internet boom, data centres grew in demand, bringing in good return of investment for the initial players. That attracted more players to join the market.
“Unfortunately a data centre is not just a piece of real estate, you need to have the expertise to manage clients’ needs and ever changing technology that at once acts as a catalyst and an obstruction to the industry.”
He said the data centre industry was a capital expenditure-heavy industry with high operation cost.
“Unless you have the expertise to balance these, your company is set to make losses. And when a data centre falls, customers are left at a lurch to move their data at a very short notice. So there’s a trust deficit as well with companies looking towards public cloud hosted out of the country than in the country itself.”
On the industry outlook next year, Chiew said the government was moving towards making Kuala Lumpur a smarter city.
“Smarter cities mean more data collected, more powerful facial recognition closed-circuit televisions and that means more computing
power. So we will definitely be seeing more needs for data storage.”
Over the last two years, he said there were more Internet protocol televisions or online content providers emerging
“From only one last year, IFLIX, we now have Netflix and The Stars DIMSUM. So we can expect to see more large-scale content providers emerge in the coming years besides small scale ones.”
Chiew said this year had been one of AIMS’ best years.
“We will continue to report double-digit revenue growth at the end of the year, outnumbering the industry’s expected growth. Our longstanding ability to commit excellence to our customers makes us a trustworthy partner. We have stayed
above the current by constantly being in line with the changing landscape of the industry.
He added that backed with strong expertise and foresight, AIMS had risen above the industry norm and was growing both locally and regionally.
“Our data centre space has been expanded by 10,000 this year and we are now at a 90 per cent capacity, we are still getting request for space,” said Chiew.
AIMS has invested into building a greener data centre to provide clients with cloud abilities.
He said the clients were focused on expanding the business regionally in emerging economies would benefit from AIMS expertise and industry know-how of running a data centre.