The AIMS Group, one of Southeast Asia’s leading carrier-neutral data centre services provider, projects a positive outlook for 2020.
In a media statement, AIMS said with the expansion of its local and regional footprint within South East Asia (primarily in Thailand and Vietnam), along with the government’s digital transformation initiatives to attract more foreign direct investment (“FDI”), AIMS believes this can further elevate the country’s efforts in becoming a sustainable and prosperous digital nation.
“Initiatives such as customised investment incentives amounting up to RM 1 billion annually over five years, to attract targeted Fortune 500 companies and global unicorns, will make Malaysia an attractive hub for regional and international companies. At AIMS, we are ready to provide our expertise as the leading data centre in the region to help companies expand their regional presence,” said Chiew Kok Hin, Chief Executive Officer of AIMS Group.
The Group said it is also looking at opportunities to expand its presence locally, given the clear need of purpose-built data centres for companies that require high power usage and large floor space to safeguard their mission-critical data and other IT infrastructure needs.
“2019 has been a successful year for AIMS and we are looking forward to a promising 2020 ahead. Moving forward, we would like to look into opportunities to further establish AIMS Data Centre as a key regional data centre player and operator, and unlock the long term potential of the data centre business. Our latest addition to our regional presence is the AIMS Data Centre in Thailand,” adds Chiew. “Our strategy is to replicate AIMS Malaysia’s success and create a similar ecosystem by leveraging on AIMS’ credibility to expand our capability across the region.”
AIMS was also honoured with the Frost & Sullivan 2019 Company of the Year award in the Cloud Infrastructure Service Industry category, in recognition of AIMS’ capability to cater to the cloud connectivity needs of its customers through its direct connectivity to hyper-scale cloud vendors on AIMS’ cloud exchange platform. Moreover, the announcement of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect location at Menara AIMS made it the only Direct Connect location in Malaysia, helping customers reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections. In addition to that, the Menara is also the location for Azure Express Route and other Cloud Service Providers making AIMS effectively the first and most inter-connected Cloud Exchange in Malaysia.
The data centre services provider said the high energy costs for data centres in Malaysia, which account for more than 40 per cent of operating costs, continues to be a major hurdle for global data players looking to host or build data centres in the country. The main challenges for the data centre players to overcome this include the lack of choices for utility providers and independent power providers (IPP) and low awareness of the overall contribution that the data centre industry could create for the Malaysian economy, for example, in the area of healthcare and education. Hence, AIMS said it will continue to lobby for the recategorisation of the data centre power tariff to further increase the competitiveness of Malaysia as the regional data centre hub. The Group strongly believes that if there is more regulatory support as proven by the efficient amendment of the cabotage policy, the data centre industry in Malaysia would flourish more rapidly, subsequently expediting FDI into the country and helping to speed up the digital economy of Malaysia.
