Carrier neutral data centre: one of the best setups for data centre

Amjad A. Hafez, CEO of Nournet talks about the advantages of carrier neutral data centre.

Regarding data centres, when we interviewed Saudi Telecom Company (STC) they told us that they are building their own data centres, and there are a lot of players entering the market. It is a very competitive sector. How do you differentiate yourself from all of these players? How difficult is it to provide differentiation in a saturated market such as this?

As you mentioned there are many players in the datacentre segment, but our story is different because we are pushing for a carrier neutral datacentre.
Not all customers want an operator datacentre, some want to have the liberty to get services from all of the other operators. Nournet is trying to be that carrier neutral set-up in Saudi Arabia.

The datacentre business is very competitive but we consider it as vital for our business model because we consider it the crystal of all of the other services that we are going to offer including the managed IT, the public & private clouds, the internet services and the managed connectivity services.
By offering this, it gives the customers the liberty to go and make the best decision on the best available infrastructure and that comes as a big advantage to the end-user and the customer themselves.

We’re building a data center in Eastern Riyadh whose total built area is 4,500 sq meters and is a tier-3 modular setup. We’re going to offer the full spectrum of services from basic physical colocation upto public and private cloud. Security is a critical component there so if you want to reach to your hosting, you have to pass through 5 levels of security. We also offer a business continuity setup which will be utilized in case of a disaster. The most important asset we have is that all operators are there in our data center.