Newsgist-Businesses should see challenges as opportunities – Opeke

Newsgist-The Chief Executive Officer, MainOne, Ms. Funke Opeke, in this interview with DAYO OKETOLA, agrees that doing business in Nigeria is difficult, but urges entrepreneurs to use the challenges as the springboard for success

What is the rationale behind your investment in data centres?  

 We started this business with a submarine fibre cable. This was really about connecting people to the rest of the world. But when you are connected to the rest of the world, there is something you are connecting: your local offices and your computer systems, and as such, organisations started connecting their offices to our facility. And then they see how we run our facility, which is outsourced. Some of them are doing businesses where their customers need to reach them on the Internet.

So, we are seeing an evolution that has advanced the market. Rather than build their computer systems in their offices, they want to put their computers and servers in a better connected facility. Sometimes, they don’t even want to own the computer, they want you to own the computer and they just rent computers’ time and facilities from you to run their businesses because they are already very well connected and their customers are well connected too. That is really what we are doing. We will continue to facilitate connectivity and the online business. For instance, for online banking, a bank needs a primary computer system, disaster recovery system, which means they need to build two data centres. It is very expensive if you are building it by yourself, but if you subscribe to a shared facility, you probably will get better services. So, that is the direction we are moving in. That is, to expand the portfolio of services that we are able to offer to our core customers and to leverage on our strength such as reliability, innovation, services and to bring things like cloud computing into the Nigerian market. The investments are here, the infrastructure is here and we will build the skill base around it to really drive innovation. That is the direction we are going.

How will the new data centre benefit businesses in the country?

Let’s talk about content and services. If you are a bank doing online business, you need to have your computers all the time because all of us are going online either trying to do transfers or check our money or make payment online. If you try to reach that server and it’s not available, it’s a problem. So, for you to complete your transaction you need the server and you need connectivity to the Internet. So, that is where we come in. We have connectivity to the Internet, and now we have the place for the servers. If you are distributing Nigerian movies online, if you are getting it today, you are getting it from offshore. If we have it here, then you are closer and you can actually get a better performance. If you are the producer or the distributor, then you can put your content here in Nigeria.

For international content providers, who also see Nigeria as a big market, they don’t have to go offshore to get the service. What this really does is help to create this digital economy. Almost every day now we see a new online business model such as the Kongas, the Jumias, the Wakanows, the Jobbermen, who have local information, local services and local goods here in Nigeria to serve this market or perhaps other markets in West Africa. They can have that information here. That is what the facility is designed to do. The focus is to add to the connection by giving businesses a place where they can run their operations from. That’s what the data centre does and they don’t have to build it themselves. They don’t have to worry about building data centres before going into their businesses. They don’t need to build a computer centre; they can run the bank-end in a facility we have provided.

How have you been running your submarine cable without any outage since inception?

Superior engineering for higher availability and superior operational processes have been our key strength. In terms of superior engineering, we designed the submarine cable specifically for its environment by taking cognizance of the risks involved. We have also put in place adequate investments because this is a business where you cannot cut corners while putting the network in place.

On superior operations, there are engineers managing the facility 24/7, 365 days a year and they are very vigilant. They monitor the cable with GPS systems; so, we are looking at any disturbance coming near our cable and we are able to get there. Again, we have all the necessary support agreements with our suppliers to ensure the overall system is kept up and running. So, it’s not as if we haven’t had some component failures before, but we haven’t had any major component failure in a way that service will be disrupted on the cable. And that means we have never lost power to the system since inception. Sometimes, the generators do go down but we have adequate UPS and battery systems to ensure that we have power back-up to keep the system running.

Is there a data centre like this in any part of Africa?

This is a huge investment as you know. A few weeks ago, we signed a new facility of $100m with Standard Chartered, First Bank, Skye Bank and FCMB. So, clearly, we had to go back to the market for financing to continue to drive our growth. We do not believe there is any data centre like this in West Africa to the best of our knowledge. However, I am aware that there are less than a handful of data centres of this size in South Africa.

How much will the new data centre cost?

The new data centre will cost over $25m.

How will you evaluate the broadband policy implementation of the Federal Government?

The role of the Communication Technology Ministry is policy direction and I think they have put together a very competent policy. But I know that efforts are being put together to ensure that more emphasis is placed on the implementation of the policy and to ensure that the implementation agencies are held accountable. So, we actually see something happening in the Information and Communications Technology industry.

You said Nigeria is a difficult place to do business, why?

Yes, Nigeria is a difficult place to do business. Let’s talk about power for example and the cost of utility. Someone mentioned that South Africa has 90 per cent of data centres in Africa. This is because of the availability of stable power supply among other requirements. But the story is different here. However, if power supply challenges are resolved, doing business will be a lot easier for all of us even for us as a business not to talk of us as service providers. Yes, the environment still has a lot of opportunities and challenges. But those challenges, as a service provider, represent opportunities as well. For other businesses, seeing these challenges as opportunities is a veritable recipe for success.

What challenges do you foresee as you expand your data centre investments?

In terms of what we foresee, I will say we foresee excellent operations. But we have had to invest in 1.5 megavolt generators. If we had adequate public power supply, we would have invested less in generators because we would probably have more supply from the public utility and might need only one back-up generator. We would probably be able to reduce spending on generators by 60 per cent and invest less on UPS systems.

In terms of the equipment we are deploying, a lot of them are not manufactured in Nigeria; they have to be imported. We need to have the spare parts at hand and we have to train our staff offshore so that they can effectively maintain and service the equipment. But those are the things we understand and we are able to do. It makes it a little more expensive for us to do business. But the value as a service provider again is that we think if each bank also runs computers, if each oil company runs computers and government establishments also run computers, it will not be cost-effective in the long run. Rather than each one of them building a computer centre and buying two large generators, we can consolidate all these services and we can provide for them. These are the challenges we see, but again, the challenges represent the opportunities available to us as a service provider.

Can you explain the reasons behind the choice of Lekki as the location for your data centres, among other huge investments and are your investments safe from environmental threats such as flooding, among others?

We have operated in this area for over four years now and obviously we have also done a lot of engineering work to understand the terrain and the weather pattern in this area as well as the kind of risk our business could possibly face. Based on experience and detailed engineering studies that we have done, this is a secure operation. Yes, the Lekki shoreline continues to erode. Our cable is on the shoreline and we have taken necessary measures to ensure that continue erosion of the shoreline where our cable passes, which is about four kilometres from our data centre, does not have any impact on our operations. We are four kilometres away from the shoreline and if you think we are at the risk of flooding and rainstorm, we have elevated our facility significantly above the natural ground level. Flooding is not a foreseeable threat because we have adequately addressed the threat with our designs.