The East Africa Data Centre and Liquid Telecom have been honoured at this year’s Global Telecoms Business (GTB) Innovation awards under the “Best Business Service Innovation” category for their pioneering work in building the most connected data centre in East Africa.
The awards, organised by the Global Telecoms Business magazine, celebrate the joint work of vendors and operators in innovative projects that better serve the telecom industry’s end customers.
Opened in September 2013, East Africa Data Centre is the largest and most sophisticated in Africa outside South Africa. Designed to meet international standards TIA-942, it is the only purpose-built data centre outside South Africa and has solved the biggest challenges for data centres across the continent – namely connectivity, security and power supply.
Many blue chip customers are already present in the building, including banks, mobile network operators, ISPs and cloud solutions providers.
Dan Kwach, General Manager at East Africa Data Centre, said “Our dedicated data centre team has worked extremely hard to build the most connected place in east and central Africa. It’s an honour to receive this prestigious award and to be recognised by our peers in the global telecoms industry. By keeping African data in Africa we are helping to build Africa’s digital future.”
The East Africa Data Centre is carrier neutral with connectivity to the backbone and metrofibre offered by all the local Kenyan carriers and many international carriers such as Tata, Level3 and Seacom, making it the most connected data centre in east and central Africa. Ben Roberts, acting Managing Director of Liquid Telecom Kenya, said “The East Africa Data Centre has transformed how data traffic is handled in the region and is a worthy recipient of this global award. As the data centre’s major connectivity services partner, we’re extremely pleased that our provision of high-speed reliable connectivity has also been recognised at these prestigious awards.”
Liquid Telecom is a data, voice and IP provider in eastern, central and southern Africa. It supplies fibre optic, satellite and international carrier services to Africa’s largest mobile network operators, ISPs, financial institutions and businesses of all sizes. The firm has Africa’s largest single fibre network spanning more than 17,000km.
