Liquid Dataport, part of Cassava Technologies, has launched an Software Defined Network (SDN) offering, Dataport, a client-controlled network that can be scaled and customised to suit the datacentre user market, SME market segment and South Africa’s 20 000 connected buildings.

Speaking on the sidelines of the 2022 AfricaCom event, hosted in Cape Town this week, Liquid Dataport CEO David Eurin said the new solution is a US$20-million investment and provides a readily available platform to African companies and carriers that are looking to invest in their datacentre fabric or international business.

“Being the first and leveraging the position that we have as leaders of connectivity and internet provisioning across the African continent, is definitely going to be an advantage as a company. Because that makes us more customer-friendly, more customer-centric, and we answer more needs on the network and offer more control, and therefore we expect to get market share,” said Eurin.

He added that the decision to develop and roll the solution out behind the solution was based on the increase in demand for capacity across Africa, as well as the capacity the company has available on its network.

According to Eurin, Liquid has invested significantly in the network and even more so in subsea cable infrastructure, which has ensured a high level of capacity.

“We are now looking for ‘what is the best way’ to expose all this capacity to our customers,” he said.

Any business, ranging from SMEs to large enterprises, can link onto the platform and customise a service based on their require traffic routes, points-of-presence and specific market requirements.

“If African businesses were to level the playing field against their counterparts in more developed economies, SDN is the answer. How we work has evolved, and our customers now expect to pay for services as they consume them. The flexibility we have brought customers through this solution has allowed them to select and scale their network requirements according to their individual needs and only pay for what they use,” Eurin added.

The offering will be deployed in South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania and the United Kingdom and France in its first phase, with more countries and PoPs to ensure increased coverage in the future. 

The company said users have complete control over their operations through an efficient, easy-to-use web portal, from choosing destinations, speed and bandwidths, managing traffic demand, checking costs, and more. 

With Dataport, customers have complete oversight of services provisioned at their fingertips, said Liquid Dataport.

One of the most significant benefits of customers partnering with Liquid Dataport is that the SDN solution is deployed on Liquid’s owned network.

According to the company, this means customers can break away from the traditional approach of siloed networking and even take advantage of our extensive fibre backbone across the continent.