ASPGulf, the Middle East's first application service provider (ASP), has announced the establishment of the first data centre at Dubai Internet City.
The company took the move to set up the first commercial live data centre in the Gulf along with partners Cisco, Computer Associates, Microsoft and Dell. The ASPGulf Data Centre is a centralised facility to host and manage business applications and a variety of IT services.
"We have set up the first live data centre in the region at DIC in response to an increase in interest and demand in the region for hosted applications," said Duncan Watson, CEO of ASP Gulf. "We have used the leading technologies to build a state-of-the-art data centre that includes server farms, networking components, physical security, an operations centre, a storage area network, an operating system and databases, a network management platform and other components required to provision applications and hosting services."
Watson said ASPGulf would provide customers with a range of IT-managed services for hosting business applications in a secure, reliable and high availability data centre environment.
The server farm is based on Dell PowerEdge servers & PowerVault storage products, supplied and supported in the UAE by Emirates Computers, the company said.
"The revolutionary ASP business services model, already highly popular in the world's advanced information economies, brings centralised and fully managed hardware, software and skills capabilities to users, drastically slashing the high 'barrier to entry' represented by high software licence and hardware costs and the need to buy-in skilled personnel," said an ASPGulf spokesman.
"Clients of ASPGulf can deploy 'thin client' desktop computers and rely on dedicated high-speed network access to give users access to their software applications and data, held in a centralised and highly secure facility."
Cisco Systems, the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, provided the vital link to this project.
"We regard ASPs as the other facet of the new economy as they provide the answer to more widespread Internet penetration and IT systems implementation," said Craig Taylor, Regional Manager Cisco. "We will continue to support ASPGulf's efforts in increasing awareness of application hosting model and its benefits in the e-economy."
"Microsoft sees the ASPGulf data centre as a step in the right direction for an increase in Internet adoption in the region. ASPs offer a compelling proposition to companies competing in today's new economy," said Yasser Zein El Din, marketing manager, Microsoft Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean.
"The ASPGulf data centre will be able to demonstrate first-hand, how businesses in the region can benefit from hosting business applications and in turn focus on their core business. Moreover, software services delivered over the Internet are a move towards Microsoft's. NET vision to enh-ance agility in business computing."
CEO of Dubai Internet City Ahmed Bin Bayat said: "Dubai Internet City has created the momentum in spearheading the way to join the high end of the technology world. We believe that the future of Dubai, the UAE, and the region as a whole will depend to a great extent on the Internet."
ASPGulf is headquartered in Dubai and has been established to provide local and regional businesses with off-site Internet-based computing. The ASP business model allows organisations to escape costly hardware/software investments and upgrade cycles. ASPGulf provides financial and human resources, procurement, distribution, customer relationship management applications, productivity tools and messaging and collaboration tools on a rental basis for a monthly fee. The company's services are underpinned by highly secure and reliable services provided by partner Dubai Internet City (DIC).
