Setback in Opera’s South African data centre plans

Setback in Opera’s South African data centre plans

chevron_left orwegian-based Web company Opera is delaying the launch of its Ndata

centre in South Africa because of the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In March, ITWeb exclusively reported that the company was looking to open a local data centre this year.

However, Jørgen Arnesen, executive vice-president of mobile browsers at Opera, this week told ITWeb that the bid to open the facility will not go ahead as planned.

“We are still looking at this [data centre launch], but we have delayed our initial plans due to the unexpected turns that the world has seen this year. We hope to get it back on track in the near future,” Arnesen says.

Opera is a freeware Web browser for Microsoft Windows, Android, iOS, macOS and Linux operating systems, developed by Opera Software.

With 6.93% market share in Africa, Opera is the third most popular browser on the continent after Chrome (70.14%) and Safari (8.93%).

According to the company, primary use of the planned data centre will be to improve the user experience with even faster browsing using Opera products.

Besides the setback in data centre plans, Opera is, nonetheless, witnessing strong growth of its user base, Arnesen says.

“We recently announced we have more than 380 million Opera users globally, where 140 million of these users are Africa-based,” he says.

“We believe this growth is fuelled by the quality of our browsers and mobile apps as they integrate unique features that no other browser can offer today in any digital app store. We are constantly adding more reasons for users to use our products.”Opera believes Africa is a region with massive potential for the adoption and development of technology.According to Arnesen, recent reports indicate that more than 300 million mobile Internet users will be active in 2020 in Sub-Saharan Africa, from which 40% of them choose Opera products for their mobile devices, such as the Opera browser for Android, Opera Mini, Opera Touch and the standalone apps Opera News and Opera News Lite.“This indicates to us that there’s a lot of people out there who want something more – something different than the simple default browsers like Safari and Google Chrome currently offer,” he says.Arnesen points out that this year, the Norwegian-based company has been partnering with leading telcos on the African continent, where it is bridging the digital divide and helping people come online.“So far this year, we’ve launched dedicated data plans with MTN and Airtel in Nigeria, […]

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