Govt to form new firm for data centre business
The government has decided to form a specialised firm -- Bangladesh Data Center Company Limited (BDCCL) -- to run business centring data storage in the country.
The company’s paid-up capital will be Tk 50 crore and authorised capital will be Tk 2,000 crore.
It will get Tk 100 crore as equity to run the business, Cabinet Secretary Khandker Anwarul Islam told journalists after a cabinet meeting yesterday.
The cabinet okayed the draft of the company’s memorandum of articles, which will now be sent for registration to the Office of the Registrar of Joint Stock Companies and Firms.
“Bangladesh is generating a huge amount of data and also has achieved tremendous improvement on data storing capacity as we have already set up the world’s seventh largest Tier 4 data centre,” said Zunaid Ahmed Palak, state minister for ICT, told The Daily Star.
The government also has a Tier 3 data centre that contains a huge amount of data.
On November 28, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina opened the Tier 4 facility called National Data Centre .
All government data has been saved in the centre free of cost and the government is now trying to get the private sector to store theirs too, Palak said.
“Hosting the government data saves at least Tk 353 crore annually. We also have the opportunity to earn from the private sector as well.”
The specialised company was formed as the government plans to follow the private sector’s model to run the data storage business. Data centres have huge potential in Bangladesh with the annual service charge amounting to about Tk 1,000 crore.
The ICT division in 2016 took the initiative to set up the Tier 4 centre on a two lakh square feet facility, that too on seven acres of land .
It was established with Chinese financial and technical assistance with certification from the USA’s Uptime Institute, an organisation best known for its “Tier standard” and associated certification of data centre compliance standards.
It cost Tk 1,599.55 crore to establish the centre at Kaliakoir in Gazipur and recouping it will take only a few years, Palak said.
“We have a huge space of storing up to 200 terabytes of data in this centre.” The company will be run by a board in which the secretary to the ICT division will be the chairman and six other secretaries and additional secretaries from other ministries members.
The cabinet yesterday also gave the go-ahead to changes in a memorandum of articles of Startup Bangladesh Company Ltd.
“We have already provided funds of Tk 11 crore to 120 start-ups and another 115 are in the pipeline to get fund from us,” said Palak. In the current budget, the finance minister has allocated Tk 100 crore for start-ups. Palak said they were planning to seek Tk 50 crore from that allocation and work to develop a mindset of becoming entrepreneurs instead of employees in the country.
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