Vodafone investing €7m in data centre services

Vodafone Ireland is investing €7 million as it seeks to bring new data-centre services to customers. The move is part of Vodafone's plan to beef up its cloud and hosting business in Europe.

The new services will include everything from co-location, managed hosting, private cloud and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The firm said it is already talking to potential customers about the new services, which are expected to be up and running by October.

The investment will include capacity in Vodafone’s data centre in Ireland, which serves Vodafone Europe, and leased capacity in two other sites in the Dublin area to provide the services.

Dark site

The location of its Dublin facility, which Vodafone Ireland head of enterprise product management Liam O’Brien says is a “best-in-breed facility” is not publicised, to preserve its security. Vodafone Ireland refers to it as a dark site.

Vodafone Ireland enterprise director Anne Sheehan said €25 million had been invested in the data centre before the latest announcement.

“We put a further €7 million into it for enhanced capacity that we feel we need for the enterprise customers,” she said. “There’s no downside to this investment for us.”

That investment also means more jobs at Vodafone. The company has grown by 120 people over the past 12 months, with some of those taken on as part of this project. A further 20 jobs are expected to be created, mainly in technical roles.

“As companies look to transform themselves and become more agile and flexible, trying to manage traditional IT is becoming more complex and harder than expected. The world is changing quickly. Companies need to adapt and change quickly. They might do it themselves but it’s difficult when they’re not experts,” said Mr O’Brien.

He pointed to growing demand for more information and functions across a range of devices as a key driver for take-up of its new services.

“The move towards cloud and data centre services enables companies to take that complexity in their own environment and give it to someone who is best placed to manage it in a more flexible and more agile way,” he said.

Transformation

“Vodafone is slap, bang in the middle of that. Transformation. For it to work you have to have to have really high-quality networks, whether it’s high- bandwidth data services that are fixed, or high bandwidth for mobile. Vodafone provides all that. Providing the data-centre services in the middle of that is a no-brainer,” he added. The addition of the data centre services will make Vodafone an end-to-end services provider.

Ms Sheehan said the landscape had changed significantly in recent years.

“We’ve seen a convergence between telco and IT,” she said. “Customers want to be able to talk to an organisation that understands the data journey from the device to the network into the data centre, into the cloud, and it’s easier to manage more secure if you have one company that can do it all.”