Data center service providers are experiencing a prosperous time as the demand for the services tends to increase in accordance with the e-commerce development. Meanwhile, the economic downturn has prompted businesses to be thrifty by using services instead of developing database system themselves.
Data center service providers are experiencing a prosperous time as the demand for the services tends to increase in accordance with the e-commerce development. Meanwhile, the economic downturn has prompted businesses to be thrifty by using services instead of developing database system themselves.
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The open policies on e-commerce development set up by the Ministry of Industry and Trade have encouraged businesses to pay attention to e-transactions and online marketing. Since most businesses are small and medium, they tend to use services instead of developing database system themselves, in order to save money in the current economic difficulties.
These are the most important factors that help the data center service market develop. The agents, i.e. the providers of virtual servers, hosting web, email services, and suppliers, i.e. the infrastructure providers and the businesses leasing areas for server setting, all have seen their business prospering.
Nguyen Viet Nam, Director of Vi Na Server Company, said that the demand has increased by 50 percent over the same period of the last year, especially the demand for flexible virtual private server, email system and data storage.
According to Nam, flexible virtual private server has become the choice of many businesses, because it allows to change the bandwidth capacity and server resources immediately when necessary, while users only have to pay additional fee for the used time.
The model proves to be most suitable to online businesses, which always have to upgrade the database to receive bigger number of visitors during sale promotion campaigns.
Meanwhile, Huynh Trong Van, Managing Director of ODS, said that the demand for services from agents increases by 10 percent monthly.
However, the growth rate still does not satisfy service providers, who believe that the growth rate could be even higher if considering the market potentials. There are about 500,000 operational small and medium enterprises, which all could be the potential clients. Meanwhile, the number of service providers is just equal to one percent of the amount. Therefore, experts have every reason to believe that the data center service market would witness a boom in the next few years.
Striving for added value services
Service providers, though admitting the attractive growth rate, still said that their profits have been “shrunk”. While the input costs have increased, especially, the electricity price has increased by 30 percent over the last year, they still cannot charge higher service fees, which means that they have to accept lower profits.
Van said that his company has announced the ending of the low-cost physical server program which aims to support small and medium enterprises, due to the current overly high costs. The program has been running for two years, and it is expected that some 200 servers of the program would return to use the normal service packages by the end of the year.
Besides, other factors, including the uncontrolled transmission quality (it depends on transmission service providers), the exhausting of version 4 IP addresses all have also influenced businesses’ operation.
When asked about the business strategy in the time to come, Van said that the company would pay big attention to develop the services such as SMS infrastructure, fiber services, and support businesses in using low-cost server service packages after the conversion. Besides, the company is also building up international transmission lines in cooperation with Hutchison, a partner, hoping that the project would be completed by February 2012.
Van is working out with software firms on the plan to lease software for managing servers. The problem now is that the prices of the software products are relatively high, which is a real burden to the companies if they own hundreds of server systems. Meanwhile, the “life expectancy” of the software products is short, just several years. Therefore, Van believes that it would be better to lease the software to save money.
(ource: TBKTSG)
