Injazat Data Systems: MEED Assessment

12 October 2010

Attitudes among businesses in the region towards outsourcing are slowly warming

With its strong government-support and part ownership by international IT giant HP, Injazat has been able to build up a solid customer base over the past five years.

But to continue to grow its business over the long-term, Injazat will need to attract more private sector companies.

Injazat in numbers

600: Number of employees

AED380m: Cost of Injazat’s tier 4 data centre

45.5 per cent: Injazat’s share of the UAE’s IT outsourcing market

Sources: MEED; Injazat

Accumulative value of Injazat customer orders
(AEDm)
2005700
20061,300
first half 20102,500
Source: Injazat

It also needs to expand beyond its Abu Dhabi market and target customers elsewhere in the UAE and the wider region.

Injazat had the distinction of being the first IT managed services company to offer tier 4 data centre services in the Middle East. However, the high level of service offered by a certified tier 4 facility comes at a price and this has inevitably reduced the size of Injazat’s potential customer base.

Plans to build two new multi-tier data centres will help it address this.

Additionally, by offering a multi-tier data centre, it will be tapping into the growing trend within the IT managed services and business process outsourcing sector of providing a more tailored set of services to customers.

Not all parts of an organisation’s data needs to sit within a single tier, but can be organised by its importance. Less critical data can sit in a lower tier, reducing the cost of managing and running it.

Opening the tier 2/3 data centres will, however bring Injazat into direct competition with other third-party data centres in the UAE, looking to attract medium-sized companies that are not willing to pay for tier 4 services.

Injazat’s biggest challenge though lies not with rival third-party data centres, but with the companies that would be customers. Convincing IT heads to outsource services in essence involves convincing them to hand over part of their empire.

Although attitudes are changing and businesses in the region are becoming more open to the idea of outsourcing their servers and in some cases the management of IT security, networks, data and applications, the Middle East market is much less developed than that in Europe and the US.

The reluctance is slowly dissipating, and the global economic crisis has helped managers to begin to understand their IT costs better and see how a focused IT operation can enable a company to launch new services and positively impact the bottom line. The move to employing third-party data centres is expected to grow, but it will be a while before the market lives up to its potential.

Injazat server hall

Floor area 2,000 square metres

Total available server cabinets 840

Active server cabinets 720

Passive cabinets, which house cables and other equipment 120

Total server capacity 9,000

Current servers running 6,000

Source: MEED

 

 

 

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