(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Unfazed by the credit crunch slowing US investment, new research suggests that the global economic downturn will not dampen enterprise spending on data centers and data center outsourcing in Asia.
Attendants of BroadGroup’s Data Centre Asia 2008 Conference (www.datacentres.com/dca) in Singapore, were given a sneak peak of the company’s soon-to-be-published report on data center growth. BroadGroup managing director Steve Wallage told ZDNet Asia that data center floor area in Southeast Asia will increase 68 percent over the next five years on average, based on interviews with major companies and data center hosts from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
ZDNet Asia reports that of the the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (www.aseansec.org), Vietnam’s data center floor space is increasing the fastest, leading BroadGroup to predict that the country will repurpose 31,000 square meters (or 101706 square feet) of land for data center use by 2013, an increase of 86 percent from its existing 16,785 square meters. Singapore, despite being the smallest country in Southeast Asia, boasts the largest data center area currently at 171,202 square meters (or 561,686 square feet), which is expected to balloon to 293,000 by 2013.
“We have a lot of reasons to believe that data center demand will hold up pretty well,” Wallage told ZDNet Asia, noting market trends that “suggest the credit crunch will create good news for third party data center providers.” He went on to say that businesses’ shift from capital expenditure to operating expenditure has made many enterprises more willing to outsource rather than build. The economic fallout and resulting regulations in many parts of the world will likely make financial data archival services more important.
Wallace also noted that quickly growing online media and social networking sectors are also driving data center demand.
Hong Kong’s COL (the IT services subsidiary of Wharf T&T) vice president Norris Hickerson, however, expressed some doubt, telling ZDNet Asia “the financial services meltdown is not good for us,” mentioning that almost 60 percent of its corporate customers are banking institutions, and that financial services are a key driver of Hong Kong’s data center market.
BroadGroup has previously published reports on the emerging Asian IT marketplace, including one on India, which is experiencing substantial growth it predicts to top more than $1.5 billion by 2010.
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