Microsoft may eventually build two data centres in Africa, possibly in SA, to serve the continent, but no decisions have been made yet.

However, the company will aggressively expand its cloud-based (server-hosted) services to the region, beginning in SA later this year with the launch of Xbox Live, its online gaming and entertainment offering.

That’s the word from Austen Mulinder, the worldwide head of cloud services at Microsoft, who is in SA this week to speak at the company’s annual partner summit.

Mulinder says Microsoft’s investment plans are dependent on the quality and availability of infrastructure on the ground — particularly bandwidth, but also electricity — and the level of demand for cloud-based services.

He says the enormous cable capacity being built around the African continent — from cables such as Seacom and the West African Cable System — are encouraging, and could speed up any decision by Microsoft to build data centres.

Microsoft has spent “multiple billions of dollars” on giant data centres in the US, Europe and Asia. Most services to consumers in Africa, Europe and the Middle East are provided out of Microsoft’s data centre in Dublin, Ireland.

There are signs that Microsoft is warming to the idea of putting down infrastructure in Africa. “The continent has been evaluated a couple of times lately,” Mulinder says. “There is a perspective it will be a marketplace but Microsoft has not taken a firm decision on when it will deploy data centres here.”

But the decision by Microsoft’s entertainment division to launch Xbox Live in the SA market is a “significant piece of progress” in bringing more services to SA. It’s understood that Xbox Live will also be offered via the Dublin facility.

“There’s a great deal of pressure from [Microsoft CEO] Steve Ballmer to deploy our cloud strategy internationally as quickly as possible,” Mulinder says.

“If you look at the map right now, at how the map is being covered, it’s evolving pretty rapidly.”

That includes expanding not only its consumer cloud services, including services centred on its Bing search engine, but also providing hosted services for business customers. “A significant percentage of cloud services can still be deployed by our partners,” he says.

Microsoft regards the rise of cloud-based computing as a shift in the IT industry as big as the move from mainframe to client-server computing that led to the company’s rise. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral