Johannesburg, 18 Apr 2016
To meet the growing demand for locally hosted cloud services in South Africa, SAP Africa in partnership with Dimension Data have today announced the launch of a SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (SAP HEC) service, offering the market real-time technology capabilities enabled by SAP HANA - SAP's ground-breaking in-memory platform - available through a consumption-based* cloud model.
The launch in Africa follows other successful events across the globe, including Canada, Australia, Japan, Germany, Russia, The Netherlands and the USA.
This is the first cloud service of its kind in South Africa specifically designed to support both local and multinational customers for whom hosting data off-shore is problematic. This SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud offering is also designed to meet local governance and legislative requirements, making it a natural fit for both public sector as well as private business across various industries seeking to bolster their technological prowess.
Why cloud?
Cloud platforms are an increasingly vital component of agile technology architectures and the SAP HEC value proposition resonates positively with African markets, where innovation is increasingly closely aligned with efficiency, flexibility and transparency. Thanks to this new service, the public sector, as well as local private companies of any size and with any distribution model, will be able to access world-class IT infrastructure, services and applications with ease at a fraction of the cost. A recent Oxford Economics Cloud Survey among CIOs indicates 69% of companies are making significant investments in cloud technology, and that 31% of companies have indicated that cloud has already made a transformative impact on business performance.**
"Harnessing the power of the cloud is a no-brainer ingredient to the growth and success of forward-looking businesses in South Africa and on the rest of the continent," commented Brett Parker, Managing Director, SAP Africa. "Almost a quarter of local small enterprises already use some type of cloud service, highlighting the growing need for the cost-efficiency and flexibility that only the cloud provides. By introducing this exciting new service to the market, which allows for software subscription instead of purchase, SAP and Dimension Data are putting African businesses in a powerful position to exploit the unrivalled power of SAP's in-memory computing platform, SAP HANA, that guarantees agility, speed, flexibility, scalability as well as data-security and sovereignty peace of mind."
Traditional, non-HEC deployments of SAP HANA required pre-existing data centre access or on-premises installation, but with HEC, users can now exploit the revolutionary SAP HANA platform at a price and pace that suit their requirements. Enterprises already invested in the SAP technology stack can now also enjoy the benefit of quickly deploying workloads to the cloud, resulting in greater agility and business responsiveness. Existing workloads as well as new innovations can then be shifted between HEC and their existing environment, as and when the need arises.
"We are dedicated to providing a technologically advanced, low-risk solution to South African and African businesses," added Paolo Masselli, CEO of Britehouse, a division of Dimension Data specialising in SAP solutions. "Dimension Data is proud to be the first certified SAP partner on the African continent able to provide a complete managed cloud environment to SAP customers. This unique service allows customers to utilise and pay on what is required and consumed at any given time."
SAP HEC gaining momentum across the globe
With more than 400 HEC customers globally and more than 1 100 HANA instances already being managed by SAP in the HEC environment, benefits listed also include vastly simplified IT requirements, the ability to nurture bi-modal IT environments ***, which harness faster innovation and the utilisation of unstructured data to more effectively deliver the insights that unlock business value.
Today's launch of this SAP HEC service in South Africa provides a new yardstick in the rapid technological evolution of African business, opening doors for modern companies that are eager to embrace the agility and innovation of the 21st century digitised business.
* The consumption-based pricing model is based on the volume of service that is provisioned for the customer.
** Source: http://www.oxfordeconomics.com/thought-leadership/blog/growing-pains-in-the-cloud.
*** Bi-modal IT refers to the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery; one focused on stability and the other on agility.