By Modupe Gbadeyanka
Global provider of managed Internet network solutions, Expereo, has announced a major infrastructure expansion into the growing African market.
To make this a reality, the firm plans to launch several strategically located Cloud Acceleration Hubs in pivotal pan-African locations this year.
Recently, the company opened a hub in Johannesburg, South Africa, and more expected in East, West and North Africa throughout 2018.
The new Africa Cloud Acceleration Hubs will enable Expereo to connect more customers across the Internet on an enhanced global scale, with improved infrastructure and optimised Internet connectivity for the highest availability and performance of SD-WAN, IPSec and Cloud/SaaS acceleration via Expereo’s XCA and XCA Edge platforms.
Irwin Fouwels, CEO, Expereo comments: “Across Africa, we see enormous opportunity for the cloud to accelerate innovation, allow governments to provide better services, and drive economic growth for both African-based businesses and global corporates operating on the continent. To succeed, they need guaranteed performance and reliability from their Internet. That’s why we are expanding our reach with these strategically located African hubs, providing our customers with the best options for cloud connectivity on a truly global scale.”
Africa expansion
Expereo’s 2018 network infrastructure expansion will focus primarily on Africa, enabling enhanced connectivity and reliability for enterprise companies in the area. The recently launched Johannesburg hub is soon to be bolstered by new locations across East, West and North Africa.
Previously, African Internet traffic was dominated by “northbound” traffic, with data routed primarily via Europe due to the structure of the global cable systems, before arriving at its destination. Expereo expects to see a reversal of this trend, with “southbound” traffic increasing as the economies of African countries continue to grow, thus creating more cloud demand and SaaS adoption.
Major SaaS providers such as Microsoft and AWS are already opening cloud data centers in South Africa to meet this demand. Domestic Internet requirements within African countries are rising and corporates continue to expand their business into the area, all of which will drive this ongoing change.
Enhanced Internet connectivity
Expereo provides market-leading technology in Internet performance-based routing, such as XCA, which delivers optimal user productivity for Cloud Applications by optimizing Internet routing through Expereo’s global and growing network of Cloud Acceleration Hubs.
XCA actively probes all destination networks for performance metrics including packet loss, latency, historical reliability, and peering capacity, and continually selects the best routing in real-time based on these statistics.
By leveraging this technology, Expereo’s African Cloud Acceleration Hubs will deliver improved Internet connectivity optimisation, increased application performance, employee productivity benefits and much more.
Hub location and data center selection
Expereo partners with data center providers to locate their hubs on a case-by-case basis. Its hubs are strategically chosen to leverage the best service in each location, with robust connectivity to the major Internet exchanges, and with the best proximity to the Internet’s major nerve points. They are built to meet the demand of global customers who require optimal connectivity for their SD-WAN and network operations as their business grows in the African area.
Aduragbemi Omiyale 
Adedapo Adesanya