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Right place, right time: SA customers embrace hybrid cloud partnership


Johannesburg, 08 Aug 2016
Stephen Green, Executive: Next Generation Data Centres for Dimension Data MEA, says  the days of trying to convince customers of the value of cloud computing are gone.
Stephen Green, Executive: Next Generation Data Centres for Dimension Data MEA, says the days of trying to convince customers of the value of cloud computing are gone.

The Dimension Data-EMC partnership launched a year ago to catalyse hybrid cloud adoption in South Africa has elicited a response so positive that even the founding partners have been surprised.

Stephen Green, Executive: Next Generation Data Centres for Dimension Data MEA, says the partnership, dubbed Catalyst, was launched in September last year to jointly showcase solutions enabling MEA customers to move to hybrid IT environments. "The response has been gratifying", he says.

"We have seen significant uptake between our two organisations approaching the market jointly to transform customers. The costing models resonate with customers and open doors to flexible ways of doing IT refresh cycles and implementing low opex-based private cloud solutions. On top of the flexible costing models, time to market and agility are also huge benefits to their businesses, helping them to meet ever-increasing end customer and internal IT demands," says Green.

He says a real surprise for Dimension Data and EMC has been the appetite among customers to embrace the new computing models. "Gone are the days where the questions were 'if cloud' and hours were spent trying to convince customers of the value of cloud. Now, customers are asking 'how cloud?', 'where does it makes sense?' and 'how will it assist in workload transformation?'."

The Catalyst partnership, launched in 15 regions globally, sees Dimension Data and EMC jointly showcasing comprehensive offerings spanning on-premises, off-premises, private, public, and hybrid cloud with a suite of managed services.

"Through innovation and a trusted partnership, we provide leading-edge solutions that drive organisational agility," says Green. "We're global yet local, with relevant expertise to transform operations that accelerate business outcome SLAs with tangible results. Together we have a roadmap to bring to market integrated cloud and managed services built on the top performing, high-performance storage platform optimised for virtual applications."

The partnership's first product offerings include Private Cloud Edition for Enterprise, which integrates enterprise grade converged infrastructure provided by VCE (EMC) with Dimension Data's Cloud Control platform and infrastructure management services; EMC FEHC (Federated Enterprise Hybrid Cloud); and Managed Services for Datacentre built on EMC ViPR SRM.

Future solutions will include disaster recovery as a service (DRAAS), storage as a service (STAAS) as well as private cloud offerings that will meet customers' various scale and sizing needs, says Green.

"Our aim is to deliver true end-to-end hybrid cloud capability with ease of transition to new and innovative business models."

Green notes that while the timing was right to catalyse cloud adoption in the local market, uptake has also been boosted by the costing models.

"Dimension Data provides a unique pricing model - one of its kind globally - which is consumption pricing for private cloud that gives you the ability to scale up and flex back an opex cloud for your dynamic workloads and applications. This gives you the benefits of private cloud with costing and consumption flexibility you expect from public cloud."

He elaborates: "Our drive is to have cloud platforms and managed services offerings that meet the needs for enterprise customers who typically have complex environments and ever-decreasing ICT budgets. We align our cloud offerings to the NIST definitions, and to have a true private cloud offering, we have to align the costing models accordingly. Our offerings are not 'just rental' solutions custom-built as private clouds. We have put tremendous effort and intellectual property gained over the last 20 years into these solutions and we strive to offer state-of-the-art and proactive managed solutions to our customers."

Customers are at a place where they need to understand the true cost of managing their ICT environment, very often when comparing cloud solutions versus buying hardware and building themselves, they are not comparing apples with apples. When customers consume our private cloud offerings they get a fully managed end-to-end solution, backed with 9 999 SLAs and state of the art technology platforms to deliver agility and compute power that meets their needs."

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