Tag: Data Center

Singapore – Google has announced the completion of its latest data center and cloud region campus expansion in Singapore, bringing the company’s total investment in technical infrastructure in nation to US$5b.

This comes off the back of Google’s recently announced US$2 billion investment in Malaysia, which includes the development of the country’s first Google data center and Google Cloud region to meet the growing demand for cloud services locally and around the world, and Al literacy programs for Malaysian students and educators.

The Google data center in Singapore will power Google’s popular digital services such as Search, Maps, and workspace and will play an important role in enabling Google to deliver AI benefits to users and customers across Singapore. 

Moreover, the Google Cloud region will deliver high-performance and low-latency services to large enterprises, startups and public sector organizations. Google Cloud customers will also benefit from key controls that allow them to maintain security, data residency and compliance standards. 

This expansion of Google’s data center and cloud region infrastructure will help address the growing demand for cloud services locally and around the world. Complementing strategic initiatives that Google has been running in partnership with the Singapore Government, such as AI Trailblazers, Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First Singapore, and Skills Ignition SG, this move affirms the Government’s move to establish Singapore as a regional data center hub, while supporting Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0 and its focus on compute infrastructure to fuel AI-led economic development.

Kate Brandt, chief sustainability officer at Google, said, “Data centres serve as the growth engines for digital progress by providing the foundation for digital transformation and innovation. The expansion of our data center campus in Singapore reaffirms our commitment to helping Southeast Asian organizations capitalize on digital opportunities, while ensuring that growth is as sustainable as possible.”

She added, “Google is deeply committed to managing our environmental footprint, playing a key role in supporting a just climate transition, and helping to accelerate the global transition to a net-zero future.”

Bangkok, Thailand – Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has launched its first data centre in Thailand to bolster local businesses’ digital innovation capabilities. The move is also in line with the Thailand government’s 20 year National Strategic Plan to provide security, prosperity and sustainability to the nation.

With Thailand Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) coming into force in June, the launch of Alibaba Cloud’s first data centre in Thailand further reiterates the company’s commitment to comply with Thai regulations when operating locally, and to bring secure and innovative technology to the country. The data centre has secured ISO27001 and ISO20000 certificates and is compliant with Thailand PDPA regulations, as well as the financial regulatory guideline issued by The Bank of Thailand (BOT).

Tyler Qiu, country manager for Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Thailand, said, “Data security and protection remains our top priority as we continue to expand. With the establishment of our new data centre, we are committed to being compliant with Thailand’s rules and regulations.

“In addition, we want to bring our best technology offerings, as well as our vertical know-how to Thailand. With Alibaba Cloud’s successful track record supporting global businesses, we hope to create an inclusive digital ecosystem to power Thailand’s vision as ASEAN’s digital hub,” Qiu said.

The security offerings that have been brought to Thailand include anti-DDoS service, WAF, security centre, action trail, and more. These security services can boost platform security protection, proactive defence, threat detection, and investigation and response, such as protecting software, app or websites against ransomware, mining and backdoor, and trojan programs to reduce operational issues. Architecturally, Alibaba Cloud’s security centre is also able to provide compliance assessments for businesses, in order to protect online and offline servers to meet regulatory compliance requirements.

Other key products and solutions that the company have officially launched in Thailand together with the data centre include elastic computing, database, network, storage, developer services, content delivery and enterprise applications.

Alibaba Cloud has also been enhancing its local technology implementation and migration capabilities through the support of its partners. Since the launch of its Thailand Partner Alliance 100 program last October, more than 40 partners such as National Telecom, Thailand Fintech Association, HiCloud, TMES, to name a few, have embarked on the growth journey with Alibaba Cloud. Besides direct sales, Alibaba Cloud will also work with partners to innovate new solutions to support Thai businesses.

Diego Ma, CEO of HiCloud, shared, “Together with Alibaba Cloud, we are bringing world-leading solutions to Thai customers to increase cloud adoption for their businesses.”

Singapore – InMoment, the software application provider for customer, employee, and business experiences has announced the launch of its new Singapore data center, strengthening its presence in the APAC region. 

InMoment said that the establishment of the new data center is in line with its aim to accelerate growth in the Southeast Asia region and support its expanding client base in the region. 

InMoment’s provision of experience clouds dabbles in customer, employee, market, and product experience. Its flagship Experience Intelligence (XI) Platform brings together intelligence from customers, employees, and the market with the objective to drive real and actionable business value.

The XI Platform is cloud-native and helps brands move beyond managing experiences. As a first-of-its-kind in-region, InMoment said that its hyper-modern technology focuses on improving experiences so clients can prove the business value, impact, and ROI of their customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) programs.

The new Singapore data center will be providing commercial and government clients a safe and secure environment, meeting data sovereignty and security requirements in the region. InMoment said that this investment will allow more clients across the region to leverage the XI platform to power their experience improvement strategy. 

In the last two years, InMoment has opened four new offices in the APAC region – in Singapore, Shanghai, Melbourne, and Auckland. 

In April, experienced Technology Sales Executive Carl Kimball joined the Singapore office to lead sales in the region. The company shared that due to the strong demand for its services, teams in Singapore and China have increased, and therefore sees in the future a movement into a new state-of-the-art office facility in Singapore to cater to the ongoing growth. 

“Our Singapore presence has grown exponentially over the last twelve months as we have seen unprecedented demand for the new XI Platform,” said David Blakers, InMoment’s managing director of APAC. 

He adds, “We are thrilled to partner with so many of the leading brands across the Southeast Asia region, ultimately helping them to realize the benefits of CX-led business transformations.”

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Following the company’s endeavor to launch a new data center of excellence (COE) in response to the digitalization of the company’s business decisions for the used car industry, Carsome has recently appointed Piyush Palkar as the company’s latest chief data officer.

The former head of data at iflix and subsequently WeTV iflix brings to Carsome a vast experience in data and analytics across banking, energy, media and entertainment, and retail. Despite being a construction engineer by qualification, he ventured into data since his varsity days.

Palkar will lead data maturity, data engineering and management, ML/AI-based data-driven innovations, business intelligence, insights and data analytics in Carsome. He will also embed data culture in the organization to support organizational efficiency and agility through data.

Speaking about his announcement, he stated, “I am very excited to be part of the team that digitalizes the used car industry, now further strengthened by cutting-edge data technologies, as democratizing data and providing near-real time insights to different business functions are vital in driving innovation and efficiency. We will leverage data to improve customer experience via personalization, customer segmentation and propensity models.”

Palkar’s appointment by Carsome will also aid the company in its quest to use data, which allows Carsome to power its business at all stages while supporting strategic decisions. The combination of auction and market data, and machine learning (ML) model backs Carsome’s proprietary vehicle pricing optimization and inventory support system. It also helps the company in understanding different user personas and their journey as a customer, and allows for analytics-backed inventory acquisition and liquidation strategy.

Carsome co-founder and group CEO Eric Cheng explained that the company has amassed a wealth of data after six years in business, where data of hundreds of cars pass through Carsome’s platforms every single day. “By setting up our data COE, we are on full throttle in implementing data science solutions, along with data-driven insights to increase operational efficiency.”

“Our in-house data capabilities and machine learning automations increase work efficiency and enhance timely, evidence-based decision-making abilities, which in turn helps our customers get good quality services from Carsome,” Cheng added. 

The company also believes that data helps in digitalizing workflows and processes by improving internal products with artificial intelligence (AI) and ML capabilities. Application of AI and ML include automating various operations tasks, such as car number plate masking and car scoring engine; these reduce the time an inspector takes to inspect a car and therefore promote better efficiency internally while providing faster car-selling process for consumers.

Carsome is on track to hit an annualized US$1 billion in revenue by the end of the second quarter (Q2 2021). The company is also expected to complete a number of major merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions that will further cement its market leadership position in the next six months.

Singapore – Sell-side advertising platform Magnite has announced the launch of a new data center in Singapore, which accompanies the company’s continuous growth in APAC.

The new data center is designed to support the rapid growth in digital advertising services across the region and reinforce Magnite’s global leadership in CTV and omnichannel digital advertising.

As Magnite co-locates its digital television plus (DV+) and connected television (CTV) platforms in Singapore, the new data center will help standardize the company’s operations and provide maximum efficiency for buyers and publishers. The investment also allows Magnite to provide the robust technical capabilities necessary to support increased traffic.

Furthermore, the larger unified data center in Singapore will enable Magnite to better service clients across APAC from India to Australia and Japan. With this step, publishers can expect better performance and new monetization opportunities, as well as increased capacity for inventory. The company expects buyers to see better campaign performance and delivery, and have increased access to new supply.

“Preparing our technological infrastructure in APAC will give Magnite a clear competitive advantage in better servicing our clients and ultimately improve results. By unifying and standardizing our omnichannel platform, we’ll be more agile, proactive, and efficient. Our tech stack needs to evolve with the demands of the industry and we have greater flexibility to scale our infrastructure in real-time as the business scales,” said Tom Kershaw, CTO of Magnite.

Meanwhile, Juliette Stead, head of APAC at Magnite commented the new Magnite data center is a response to the company’s expectation from the entire APAC region to enjoy continued growth and recognizing the importance of investing in the region for the benefit of their clients.

“Investing at scale to optimize our capabilities ensures we will be well-positioned to respond to change. We are also building out our Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure in Singapore to further support CTV growth – including live streaming. Now more than ever, we intend to be at the forefront of the strongest segment of industry growth for the foreseeable future, and ensure our infrastructure is equipped to accommodate these developments,” Stead stated.

Singapore – France-based ad-tech company Criteo has announced its third Japan-based data center based in the capital city of Tokyo, and aims to follow the rule on corporate responsibility by making its newest data center equipped to standards of green-based energy.

Upon migration, the Japan market will be the company’s largest data center within the APAC region. Being the largest market outside of the United States, the company aims to diversify its reach within the North Asia region, particularly in Japan and Korea.

Aside from being equipped with the company’s basic services for premium ad services and inventories, the newest data center’s facilities are based on using less power and less CO2 emissions. Features such as 25Gbps connection interfaces, faster and large servers are some of the new inclusions in the new green-based data center.

“Criteo is conscious of its environmental footprint and our IT infrastructure team has always had this in mind as we look at improving our data centers. By using leading technology combined with sustainable practices, our powerful data centers around the world can support up to 2.8 trillion bid requests per week, evaluate over 64 million campaigns per second, and accumulate 700 TB data per day,” said Diarmuid Gill, Criteo’s chief technology officer. 

In a statement, Megan Clarken, chief executive officer at Criteo stated that the company’s newest data center launch is in response also with the positive growth of the ad industry in Japan.

“Rapid increases have been noted for transactions of programmatic ads and Real-Time Bidding (RTB). We continue to diversify our solutions and invest in upgrading our infrastructure and R&D to provide better service and performance to our clients. As a green-energy based data center, it demonstrates our commitment to being a socially responsible company, caring for our environment and society,” Clarken stated.

Hong Kong – Hong Kong’s data centers have been highly sought by investors and owner-operators in 2020 with majority, 54%, of the total investment volume into data centers in the Asia Pacific coming from the city, according to data by Cushman & Wakefield.

Data center investment in the region has been on the rise with total transaction volume between 2018 and 2020 totaling USD 5.7 billion, over seven times that between 2015 and 2017.

Despite the pandemic outbreak, investment activity in the sector remains relatively robust with the total transaction volume in the region over the first eight months of 2020 reaching USD 1.43 billion, about 56% of the 2019 level.

Among the most notable transactions in Hong Kong is China Mobile’s securement of an industrial government site for HKD 5.60 billion in July. The record-high asset value of HKD 5,967 per sq. ft was 56% higher than the closest bid; demonstrating the eagerness of the buyer to secure a data center site amidst limited supply.

Hong Kong has long been eyed as an ideal data center location. The latest research by Cushman & Wakefield identifies the city as the fourth most attractive data center location in APAC, trailing Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo. The city ranked highest in terms of low tax rate and low climate risks and ranked in the middle in categories of fiber connectivity, market maturity, and electricity costs. Meanwhile, it scored poorly on its high real estate costs.

At the end of the second quarter of the year, total data center stock in Hong Kong amounted to 7.9 million sq. ft, of which 80% was dominated by 10 operators including the two largest local operators – SUNeVision and PCCW Solutions, with the latter making up 31% of the market area.

Cushman & Wakefield forecasts that over the next four years, a combined 4.2 million sq. ft of supply will enter the data center market.

Cushman & Wakefield’s Associate Director for Research in Hong Kong, Eric Chong said that existing data center demand is supported by banking & finance, insurance, and telecom operators, and that in the future, such demand is expected to be largely driven by leading global cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud as well as Tencent Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud. 

Chong said, “The growing importance of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, the impending 5G network, and fast adoption rates of cloud computing as well as the post-COVID-19 ‘new’ normal are the four major factors driving the surge in demand for cloud storage”.

Singapore – Customer feedback management platform provider Medallia has announced that it has launched its latest data center in Singapore, accelerating its investment across the APAC region.

Singapore is a priority market for Medallia, being a global business and connectivity hub, said the company in a press statement. 

“The Singapore data center plays an integral part in ensuring we deliver on the data security and regulatory requirements of businesses who are scaling up customer and employee experience programs. We already have customers using the infrastructure and it will become the default location for many of our Asian customers,” said Medallia APAC Vice President and General Manager Gavin Selkirk. 

As a SaaS cloud platform, Medallia owns and maintains all backend infrastructure, ensuring that reliability, uptime, and operational capabilities match data centers around the world.

The data center will host all Medallia Experience Cloud solutions, including video, digital, speech, conversations, text analytics, and the company’s artificial intelligence product, Athena

As of current, the Singapore branch adds to the company’s ten data centers worldwide, including Toronto, London, Amsterdam, and Sydney.