Based on its recent analysis of the West African data centre market, MainOne has been recognised with the 2015 Nigerian Frost & Sullivan Award for Customer Value Leadership. MainOne, a specialist network solutions and communications services provider is being acknowledged for offering superior customer value to drive the growth of a digital economy across West Africa. The company commenced operations in 2010 with an undersea fibre cable connecting West Africa to Europe. The privately-owned, first-of-its-kind, open access 1.92 Terabyte per Second (Tbps) fibre cable facilitates international connectivity, and makes available world-class broadband services to West African enterprises, governments and educational institutions In January 2015, MainOne inaugurated its $40 million Tier III Lekki data centre in Lagos, which is managed by a new MainOne subsidiary, MDX-I.
MDX-I obtained a Tier III Certification from the Uptime Institute in December 2014, which positions it as one of the highest rated data centres in West Africa. MainOne has also received PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) and ISO 27001:2013 certifications for this facility which assures its customers that it imbibes global standards and best practices in security and operational processes.
“MainOne has set up a carrier-neutral model within its colocation data centre facility, and offers disaster recovery, data storage and cloud services in addition to basic collocation and interconnection services,” said Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst, Vivienne Mutembwa. “The advanced infrastructure greatly bolsters the expansion goals of Nigerian enterprises by empowering them to cost effectively scale up business services that involve data management and storage.”
Furthermore, the company invested in its own dedicated power transmission infrastructure which connects it directly to the national grid for power, in addition to two 1.25 MegaWatts generators. This has enabled MainOne to reduce its direct carbon footprint and diesel costs, while still maintaining mission-critical power availability.
“The company services 70 percent of the banks and more than 400 blue chip companies with its network in Nigeria,” observed Ms. Mutembwa. “It presents these organisations with a two-pronged advantage in partnering with it. Firstly, it fulfils backup and disaster recovery needs and assists in saving on operational costs. Secondly, it strives to only produce only 18 tonnes of carbon emissions, which is significantly lower than the 305 tonnes of carbon emissions from individual banks in Lagos managing their own data centre needs.”
Overall, MainOne’s dedication to supporting customers’ business goals has made it richly deserving of the 2015 Nigerian Frost & Sullivan Award for Customer Value Leadership.
Receiving the award on behalf of the Chief Executive Officer, MainOne’s Data Centre Product Manager, Mr. Vremudia Oghene-Ruemu said “the Customer Value Leadership award by Frost and Sullivan is truly an honour. It means a great deal to us that MainOne is recognized for innovation and leadership in the telecommunications industry, even as we continue to make strategic investments to enhance our network infrastructure and extend our capacity and reach across the West African sub-region and beyond”.
Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in implementing strategies that proactively create value for its customers with a focus on improving the return on the investment that customers make in its services or products. The award recognises the company’s inordinate focus on enhancing the value that its customers receive, beyond simply good customer service, leading to improved customer retention and ultimately customer base expansion.