Teraco dominates South Africa’s data centre market

MyBroadband’s business technology survey revealed that Teraco is South Africa’s most trusted data centre provider, followed by Dimension Data and Vodacom Business.

The survey was completed by 783 respondents. Only responses from executives and managers who decide which ICT products their companies buy were considered.

Teraco was a runaway winner with 40% of the vote, which showed its strong brand awareness in the South African business market.

The company’s history dates back to 2008, when a group of telecommunications entrepreneurs joined forces to start vendor-neutral data centres in South Africa.

The highly regulated and closed telecoms market in South Africa before 2008 meant that vendor-neutral data centres did not exist locally.

However, the deregulation in the South African telecommunications market changed matters, and the Teraco founders seized the opportunity.

The possibility of providing a data centre service that was not tied to any carrier or ISP became technically feasible and economically viable.

Since its humble beginnings in 2008, Teraco has received strong support from the market and enough funding to build world-class data centres in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg.

The company also created NAPAfrica in 2012 — a fully funded, non-profit, neutral Internet Exchange Point.

Teraco and NAPAfrica are now the backbone of the South African Internet, and all the major local and international tech players have some presence in these data centres.

In August 2022, New York-based Digital Realty acquired a majority stake in Teraco at a valuation of R57.6 billion.

Digital Realty acquired the stake from a consortium of investors, including Berkshire Partners and Permira.

“Africa is poised to remain a high growth, high-demand area for data centre solutions,” said Teraco CEO Jan Hnizdo.

“Our combined, diversified platform will further enable us to support our customers in the pan-Africa region and worldwide.”

Dimension Data, now known as NTT Data, has maintained its strong brand in the South African data centre market.

NTT Data’s eight data centres in South Africa are available in five provinces: Gauteng, KwaZulu Natal, Western Cape, Eastern Cape, and the Free State.

NTT continues to invest in its data centre infrastructure in South Africa, driven by the demand for capacity by local and international clients.

To satisfy this demand, NTT launched its Johannesburg 1 data centre within the Centralpoint Innovation District in Midrand in October 2022.

Once fully built out, the facility will offer 6,200 square metres of hall space and 12MW of critical IT load.

“The facility will cater to hyperscalers and enterprises, providing them with an opportunity to use NTT’s full ICT stack of services,” NTT said.

These services include managed hybrid cloud, network management, collaboration, security, and application monitoring.

Vodacom Business is another prominent player in the South African data centre market, offering Tier 3 certified facilities to customers.

Its telco-grade data centres offer reliable power, cooling, surge protection, and good connectivity.

“Vodacom has evolved data centre design in innovative ways to deliver the much-needed gains in reliability, efficiency and sustainability,” it said.

The chart below shows the most trusted data centre brands among South African businesses.