Construction on the country’s largest data centre, owned by FPT Telecom, has officially started at the Hi-Tech Park in Ho Chi Minh (HCM) City.
According to a press release, the data centre covers an area of 10,000 square metres and is expected to be completed by the first quarter of next year.
Once completed, FPT Telecom will provide a large and modern data storage infrastructure with a high-security level to thousands of domestic and foreign enterprises and organisations.
Digital transformation has been occurring not only in Vietnam but also around the world, the Chairman of FPT Telecom, Hoang Nam Tien, said. The need to bring systems and applications onto the cloud is rising.
A strong cloud platform is a basic infrastructure for the digital transformation of businesses and economies. The scale of the Vietnamese cloud industry has been predicted to increase from US $165 million in 2018 to US $291 million by 2024.
The country plans to have big data centres with high standards, ensuring security for systems and enabling local enterprises to compete with transnational tech giants.
Software engineers at FPT said the COVID-19 epidemic has not affected their income, but they have had to work harder.
FPT has made every effort to ensure jobs for its 36,000 workers. The FPT president said that Vietnam has been doing very well in the prevention and fighting against COVID-19. While India and China, the two largest software export centres of the world, are meeting difficulties in their efforts to control the epidemic, FPT will try to find more clients and take more orders to get money to pay workers.
HCM City has taken several steps recently to speed up the digitalisation of its core functions.
The city’s chairman, Nguyen Thanh Phong, said that its smart city model is an initiative that the city has been working on for the past two years. It has recorded significant success in the first phase, which started in 2017 and will finish at the end of 2020.
As OpenGov reported, the city has laid the groundwork for four main pillars of a smart city. These include a shared database and open data ecosystem, a smart city operating centre, a centre for socioeconomic forecasts and simulation, and a centre for information safety.
The operating centre, which has been functional for a month, is located at the HCMC People’s Committee headquarters in District 1.
The centre processes inputs from over 1,500 cameras from the camera systems of the departments of transport, health, education, and training and public security (also those run by various districts).
The centre for socioeconomic forecasts and simulation has been in operation since early June 2019 and will be expanded to other parts of the smart city plan from 2021. The city is preparing for the second phase of the smart city plan, which will run from 2021 to 2025. It has approved five smart city projects under the plan, with a total investment of about US$ 117 million.
