With accelerating digital adoption in the country, Globe Business is looking at expanding its data centers and capitalizing on its high growth potential to serve more enterprises in the Philippines.
Peter Maquera, SVP for Globe Business, Enterprise Group, said there are three main developments that are driving demand for data centers – increasing data traffic and consumption, the demand for edge computing, and the possibility of the Philippines becoming a regional hub for cloud providers due to its strategic location.
“The data center is one of the foundations of digital infrastructure that enables the Internet to happen. This is a high growth, high potential area, and it’s something we’re very committed to. It is an important infrastructure that the Philippines needs to provide as it becomes digitalized,” he said. Globe Business has a nationwide network of data centers serving its internal needs and corporate clients.
Maquera said the Philippines continues to be the earliest adopter of digital, and it spends the most time on the Internet than any country in the region. As a result, total data traffic per capita grows by 55-60% a year and is expected to reach 40,903 petabytes (PB) by 2025 from 473 PB in 2015. Data consumption per person per month, on the other hand, is likely to reach 28.9 GB in 2025 from 0.4 GB a decade before.
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At the same time, the rise of multi-cloud adoption and geopolitical tensions between China and the US are driving content delivery networks and Hyperscalers into the Philippine market. In just the last 12 months, three submarine cables crossing the Pacific from the west coast to Hong Kong were canceled due to an ongoing political tension between China and the US.
“While there are political tensions between nations yet, demand for digital continues to be strong. As an alternative, companies have recognized the strategic location of the Philippines. And we’re seeing an increase in investments. So what’s exciting is the potential for the Philippines to be a regional hub for data and digital infrastructure in one of the fastest-growing regions in the world,” said Maquera.
The extended lockdowns increased the demand for and usage of cloud-centric applications running on Hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, to name a few. Local enterprises are also moving their systems and applications to the cloud. Such increased adoption creates demand for digital infrastructure such as data centers.
Likewise, Maquera said more and more companies are looking to localize content for business efficiency, presenting opportunities for the country in terms of Edge data centers. Edge data centers process data and services close to end-users. Thus, if content delivery platforms use facilities closer to the customer, latency will be reduced, websites will load faster, and video streaming will be much better.
