Allied Technologies (Altech) will increase its stake in Kenya Data Networks (KDN) from 51% to 60.8%, by investing a further $39.5 million in the company.
The capital injection will be used to roll out the KDN fibre-optic network, says Altech.
KDN provides commercial leased lines, has a nationwide Kenyan fibre-optic network of over 4 000km and offers solutions using the different technologies in its bouquet of WiFi, WiMax and fibre solutions across East Africa.
“The additional equity shares in KDN to be subscribed for by Altech will be non-voting, thus preserving the strong minority shareholder local influence in KDN through our strategic partner, the Sameer Group. This local influence is essential for retention of expertise and knowledge of the region,” says Altech CEO Craig Venter.
Altech and its co-shareholder in KDN, the Sameer Group, have also invested an additional $7.5 million in KDN to build a data centre in Nairobi, Kenya.
The data centre will offer disaster recovery, virtual application hosting, data and application backup, and an ethical hacking centre and data archiving facility to clients in the areas that will be connected by the planned undersea cables. It is anticipated that the data centre will be completed in approximately 12 months.
“KDN's fibre-optic network and the undersea cables will provide more affordable international bandwidth to many East African countries, which, until now, have been totally reliant on expensive satellite bandwidth. In addition, KDN will provide centralised capacity management and cross-border customer services,” notes Venter.
Altech believes KDN is in a strategic position to provide data warehousing services to East Africa and the Middle East with its access to the undersea cables. Under Altech, the company can now provide end-to-end data service capabilities.
“Our strategic alliance with Seacom and KDN's equity stake in Teams will supply ample bandwidth for KDN to supply additional services such as call centres, data centres and IP video on demand. We have abundant terrestrial fibre linking the East African undersea cables to Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda; and also interests in various ISPs throughout East Africa, which take the cheaper and enhanced broadband service to the client,” Venter explains.
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