AIMS Group: 2015 Review and Outlook for 2016 - Datacentre Industry (EPP 3)

Chiew Kok Hin, CEO, AIMS Group

AIMS Group Chief Executive Officer, Chiew Kok Hin says “2015 has been a mixed year for the industry. This year we saw Patimas, Teliti and Jaring go into liquidation exposing their customers to significant operational risk and being forced to migrate their infrastructure to alternative service providers. The oversupply of space has caused an imbalance resulting in players opting into a price war to attract customers. Depressed price levels have driven out some of the players to shut down their operations.”

I believe we will see similar situations arise in 2016.

“For AIMS, this has been one of our best years. We’ve seem a stronger presences of MNC’s, BFSI and enterprise customers this year and we are expecting to end the year with a strong double digit growth. Our data centre space located at Menara AIMS is currently almost fully 100% utilised and we are approximately 85% full in Cyberjaya. To meet demands, AIMS will be adding another 10,000 sqft,” adds Chiew.



In April, AIMS has been appointed by Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) through an open tender to lead the 'Inter-Data Centre (DC) Network Initiative’’. This initiative is aimed at mitigating the high cost of bandwidth faced by Malaysian data centres by deploying an ultra-broadband backbone network interconnecting participating data centres within Cyberjaya. This initiative by MDeC will be able to reduce the bandwidth cost by at least 4 times compared to the market rate.

At the same time, AIMS’ strong financial resilience backed by our experience and skilled resources helped us in securing Jaring’s data centre and network related customer assets in July.

Aspirations for 2016

In 2016, AIMS will continue with our regional expansions to cater to demands in the emerging markets of SEA.

Overall, 2016 is anticipated to be a slow year due to market consolidation and current market sentiments.

“The Inter-DC Network initiative will be a game changer in reducing operation costs for datacentres and we applaud MDeC for initiating the project. At the same time we hope to work very closely with PEMANDU, MDeC and relevant agencies to look at potential solutions to lower the cost of power for the industry such as co-generation and adoption of energy efficiency best practices,” explains Chiew.

Over the year, the industry has benefited from the various trade missions, certifications and training grants given by MDeC. We hope MDeC will continue to render their support to the industry in our united goal to make Malaysia the data centre hub of the region.