Vodacom is announcing that it will be hosting the fully redundant IBM CMS Cloud delivery centre for Africa in its Midrand and Roslyn data centres. This is the first IBM Cloud centre to be rolled out in the Middle East and Africa region, and the first facility in the South African market to provide a Cloud Managed Services offering for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), as well as SAP certified Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
Vodacom will be partnering with IBM to take this Enterprise Managed Cloud Solution to the enterprise and multinational market in South Africa. This initiative will see Vodacom expand its cloud and hosting portfolio and underscore its commitment to deliver enterprise grade IT solutions to the African continent.
Customers will benefit from significant savings in investment costs and skills as the partnership with IBM will deliver a solution centre offering the same world-class standards, skills and services as other IBM Cloud centres across the world. The South African Cloud service will be linked via Vodafone’s extensive Global IPVPN network to IBM’s global CMS platform in multiple locations in Europe.
The centre will provide SAP enterprise customers across various industries in South Africa and Africa with access to a robust enterprise grade network and cloud platform integrated into IBM’s global cloud offering, leveraging IBM’s world-wide reach and expertise. This will enable businesses to run critical applications in the cloud with integrated access to a broad array of services like enterprise mobility, security and IOT, while offering faster network speeds and improved performance and reach to its end users.
Vuyani Jarana, CE of Vodacom Business, says the upsurge of enterprise cloud computing on the continent is being driven by large enterprise and multinational organisations expanding their presence and IT requirements across Africa. CIO’s are looking to gain efficiencies and cut cost by moving more of their IT infrastructure, applications and processes into the Cloud. Vodacom’s extensive Fixed and Mobile network infrastructure, Pan African and global footprint and its investment in datacentre infrastructure provides the ideal platform and environment to deliver a Managed Cloud Solution to large and multinational enterprises. The partnership with IBM will bring IBM’s leading Managed Cloud platform to the African continent enabling enterprises to accelerate their move to cloud based IT. This partnership sees both organisations delivering an industrial scale cloud platform that will meet the computing demands of very large enterprises. There have always been many doubts whether South Africa has the capability to provide a managed cloud service to very large enterprises like big retailers and financial institutions. Vodacom is committed to delivering enterprise grade cloud solutions and this partnership with IBM delivers on that scale and will position Vodacom Business as a leader in total IT solutions across the Continent.
