By Patrizia Paola C. Marcelo, Reporter
MANDAUE CITY, Cebu — PLDT, Inc. has launched its tenth data center in the country.
The telecommunications giant on Tuesday launched the P1-billion VITRO data center in this city, aimed at serving the 10,000 businesses in the province and in the Visayas.
VITRO Cebu 2 has 800 racks, bringing ePLDT’s current rack capacity to 9,150. The new facility is built from the ground up and has new technologies and features, including finger-vein scanning features, special closed-circuit television cameras, and 24/7 monitoring and surveillance.
PLDT Chief Revenue Officer Ernesto R. Alberto said the data center is targeting companies from banking and insurance, retail, government, and business process outsourcing (BPOs) industries, as well as small and medium enterprises.
“Before, companies are not really going into data centers, but now a lot of companies, even small and medium enterprises, see the value… as more companies rely on servers,” PLDT Enterprise head Juan Victor I. Hernandez said in a press conference here.
Mr. Alberto said for the data center, they target a utilization rate between 40-50% by year-end from the current 35%. He said when the utilization rate goes over 50%, the company will be looking at building an eleventh data center.
“International companies have more racks. There are more local companies but we feel there’s still room for improvement in terms of number of racks to be offloaded,” Mr. Hernandez said.
The VITRO Network of Data Centers includes facilities in Makati, Pasig, Clark economic zone, and Davao, the first in Mindanao. The 10 sites are interconnected through a software-defined network, which allows data-centric services to be available across all facilities.
PLDT Enterprise is eyeing more ventures and investments in infrastructure expansion and information and communication technology (ICT) this year.
Hastings Holdings, Inc., a unit of PLDT Beneficial Trust Fund subsidiary MediaQuest Holdings, Inc., has a majority stake in BusinessWorld through the Philippine Star Group, which it controls.
