Datacloud Africa Leadership Summit 2020

“Data Centre’s Are A Critical Component Of The Digital Infrastrucsture”: Advises Robert Mullins – Executive Director of First Brick Holdings – at Data Cloud Africa Summit 2020.

Datacloud Africa is a platform that offers thought-leadership content for digital infrastructure players across Africa. Annually, Datacloud Africa hosts the Datacloud African Leadership Summit that invites top and leading industry executives, experts and investors inserting data centers and digital infrastructure in Africa.

This year, the 2-day Virtual Datacloud African Leadership Summit 2020 revolved around the agenda of relevant trends and talking points for the sector in 2020, and also the trends and activities going on across North Africa.

The event brought together over 700 attendees from the region’s critical data center players with the broader telecoms ecosystem, including fibre, subsea and carriers among the attendees of the summit.

Robert Mullins, the  Executive Director of First Brick Holdings and Raxio Data Centre Ltd, was present and part of the strategic conversation and C-level insight in regard to ‘The Future of Data Centres & Cloud Services in Africa’, one of the topics in the agenda of the Summit.

Alongside him to discuss and bring insight to this topic were, the moderator of the session Philip Cooper, Director of Digital Infrastructure Accelerator; Funke Opeke, Chief Executive Officer at Main One; Stephane Duproz, CEO at Africa Data Centers; Amine Kandil; CEO at N+ONE; Jan Hnizdo, CEO at Teraco Data Environments; Asif Valley, National Technology Officer at Microsoft; John Eland, CEO at NTT Global Data Centers and Zaid Youssef, Vice President at Secure Power, Middle East and Africa Schneider Electric.

Together, Robert and the panelists present discussed Africa’s data centre and cloud activity over the last 12 months, reflected on the circumstances that 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic brought to the African continent and also talked on the future direction of the Africa market, investment and digital infrastructural development.

“Investors with experience in this sector understand that data centers are needed because they’re a critical component of this digital infrastructure and that is definitely lacking across many of these. However, there is unwillingness to agree from some  investors on the continent and that is something we are seeing as we continue to talk to investors to join us.” Robert commented when asked about the investment community’s view of the African Data space now.

Phillip concluded the session with a comment on where the focus has shifted in the sector saying, “For the last 10 years, the whole focus was on macro towers and now we can see the focus on cloud, data centers and fiber.”