The AIMS Group, Southeast Asia’s leading carrier-neutral data services provider, today shares its review of 2016 and outlook for 2017.

AIMS Group Chief Executive Officer, Chiew Kok Hin says “In the last two years we have 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.

The data centre industry is a CAPEX heavy industry with high operations cost. And 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.

AIMS in 2016

“For AIMS this has been one of our best years. We will continue to report double digit revenue growth at the end of 2016, outnumbering the industry’s expected growth. Our long standing 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. Backed with strong expertise and foresight, AIMS has risen above the industry norm and is growing both locally and regionally. Our data centre space has been expanded by 10000 this year and we are now at a 90% capacity, and we are still getting request for space,” adds Chiew.

AIMS invested heavily into building a greener data centre and to provide our clients with cloud abilities. They are focussed on expanding the business regionally in emerging economies who will benefit from AIMS expertise and industry knows how of running a data centre.

In 2016, AIMS was also the first data centre in Asia Pacific to partner with Network Infrastructure Inventory Inc. (Ni2) to provide customers with IT Service Management (ITSM), Operational Support Systems (OSS), and Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) capabilities in one platform. The platform is essential for customers in the financial, oil & gas and telecommunications sectors as it gives them the capability to automate trouble shooting, integrate monitoring, optimise infrastructure design for faster capacity delivery, improve customer experience and enhance self-management capabilities.

Data in 2017

“The government is moving towards making KL a smarter city. Smarter cities means more data collected, more powerful facial recognition cctvs and that means more computing power. So we will definitely be seeing more need for data storage.”

“In the last two years we have also seen more IPTV or online content providers emerge. From only one in 2015, 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. There’s a trend to producing videos via Instagram, Boomerang, Snapchat and more and this is further contributing to the increase of storage space,” he adds.

Challenges in 2017

“High cost of power continues to be the pain point for the industry and unless we see the government taking a proactive move, this will remain our biggest challenge. Power makes up 40 percent of our operating costs, and what we’ve noticed is that, as more data is consumed, power consumption increases.”

“While we hope the government will look into recognising the industry as an important aspect of the government’s aim to push for a digital economy, we are taking measures on our side as well. AIMS green technology investments will make power consumption more efficient. Further to that we are using infrastructure that can handle higher temperature. Even if we increase the temperature by 1 degree, we will see immense savings in terms of power cost. The challenge here is that customers aren’t able to move away from the mentality of what the ideal temperature is. We hope the industry associations will look into advocating the increase in temperature,” ends Chiew.

About AIMS Group of Companies (AIMS)

The AIMS Group (AIMS) is Malaysia and South East Asia’s leading carrier-neutral data centre operator and managed services provider. Located in the central business district of Kuala Lumpur and Cyberjaya, AIMS provides international class data storage facilities and ancillary services, augmented by an unrivalled platform for inter-connectivity; AIMS is one of the most interconnected sites in Malaysia and SEA. Besides its main datacentre in Menara AIMS, AIMS also operates datacentres in Cyberjaya, Johor, Singapore, Penang and Sabah. The AIMS Group was awarded the “Best Data Centre Engagement of The Year” by Outsourcing Malaysia in 2011, the Frost & Sullivan “Data Centre Services Provider of the Year” award in 2014, 2016 and Computerworld’s Infrastructure as a Service 2015 Award.