Business Connexion (BCX), which is in the midst of being bought by Telkom for R2.7 billion, has unveiled its public cloud offering, which is set to offer small, medium and large businesses the sort of functionality usually reserved for huge enterprises.
Almost three years in the making, BCX's public cloud offers white-labelled solutions that its clients can sell to customers of their own. "This makes it an enablement channel, not just for BCX, but also for end-users, and empowers entrepreneurs to provide services that would previously require enormous manpower and infrastructure," says the listed company.
BCX notes it is creating a reseller and channel model so that those clients wishing to sell cloud services can provide value to their own clients without having to make additional investments in staff or hardware.
"While the offering can be branded with a client's own corporate identity, it can just as easily be sold as a Business Connexion product, which brings with it the added security of knowing data is housed in BCX's data centres."
"This marks the first time a major IT player that has traditionally focused on enterprises has offered these sorts of services to an open market using a channel model for distribution," says Charles Lalieu, managing executive for public cloud. "Business Connexion is now Africa's first true cloud brokerage."
Continuous additions
The cloud is localised and support is available around the clock, while the migration process is automated. Additional services, to be released on an ongoing basis, will be offered on top of the core product to meet clients' changing needs.
From today, BCX will start offering support for locally-hosted Microsoft Exchange, the preferred business e-mail service for most companies; Microsoft Lync, a voice and video calibration tool that also provides presence; and Microsoft SharePoint, for sharing and collaborating on documents within clients' secure intranet.
The latest update includes complementary offerings like security and compliance, as well as domain registration and a payment gateway supplied in partnership with PayGate.
The offering supports shared hosting, which integrates with all major content management platforms, including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.
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