Cheaper data and more accessible connectivity will drive the growth of the South African cloud infrastructure and professional services market, which has the potential to become a $2.3 billion market over the next three years.
This is according to Kabelo Makwane, who has joined Accenture as technology MD of its Cloud First business in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Makwane returns to SA after spending three years in Nigeria where he was country general manager for Microsoft Nigeria. Prior to this, he was segment director: public sector for Microsoft SA, where he directed the strategy for government in line with national priorities.
He believes cloud computing, as an enabling platform and IT service delivery mechanism, is allowing organisations and business to rotate and lead as well as rapidly embrace emerging technologies such as the social media, digital, Internet of things (IOT), machine learning and artificial intelligence globally.
"IT is no longer in the back-end just supporting business strategy but has in itself become business strategy for many organisations. A cloud-based model provides fast acquisition, low to no capital investment, relatively low operating costs and variable pricing tied directly to use. The advantages also includes taking away the nightmare of having to manage different disparate systems such as servers, storage, networks, security and the many applications in a typical enterprise are immense," he adds.
He further says enterprises across several industries throughout the world are rapidly migrating from traditional on-premises IT infrastructures to new orchestrated cloud platforms that allows the pooling of several cloud-based systems to provide an agile, cost-effective, flexible and more automated solution for a company's IT requirements.
According to Makwane, the global cloud market is estimated to be worth $224 billion over the past few years, the market has seen compound annual growth of between 16% and 27%. "The opportunity for growth in the cloud market is significant. The bulk of this will come from the private sector. Some are more pressed to find cost-effective new solutions than others. For instance, manufacturing has shown the highest demand for cloud because these companies want to focus on their core business rather than run IT shops."
In his previous employment at Cisco Systems, Makwena was responsible for enabling cities to deliver e-services by leveraging telecommunication broadband infrastructure for digital inclusion.
He also played an instrumental role, as regional manager for Public Sector in SA, in the formation of private public partnerships with government. One of his most significant achievements was establishing the National Private Cloud Project with State Information Technology Agency for government.
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