Business Connexion, Africa's leading provider of data centre and private cloud computing services in Africa, today officially launched its new public cloud services in South Africa. This launch comes two weeks after it launched similar services in Nigeria.
Business Connexion intends to offer these services to the market through a channel partner programme as a way of building an ecosystem all the way down the value chain (ISVs, telcos, banks, distributors, OEMs, emerging business, etc). This will also play a role in the development and regular release of applications for specific market verticals.
This type of cloud offering is the first of its kind on the African continent and is called a Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB), and allows partners to offer IT services that are focused on giving businesses that have not had access to traditional on-premise basic IT services the opportunity to leverage innovative cloud services.
Businesses will now have the opportunity to start enjoying increased flexibility and rapid provisioning of IT services with no capital investment as these services are based on monthly or yearly subscriptions. By offering these services in a hosted environment, Business Connexion will enable business with the flexibility to adapt to challenges such as unpredictable and rapid changes in the business environment, shorter provisioning cycles and improved self-service, as well as de-risk IT investments and increase efficiencies.
Business Connexion will initially offer the following services: Hosted Infrastructure, and the following software as a service, Business Email (corporate-class e-mail and shared calendaring, task and contact capabilities), Business Instant Messaging (instant messaging and presence, voice and video conferencing, and mobile applications), and Business Portal (a flexible, customisable platform that enables document sharing, workflows, discussion forums and more).
Like the cloud services the company currently offers to large enterprises, the new service offering will also be hosted in its Tier IV data centre facility, which has full redundancy and fail-over capabilities, and electrical power storage and distribution facilities with expected availability of 99.995%.
"We are excited to launch these offerings in the South African market. The demand for hosted services in Africa and South Africa continues to grow at an impressive rate, and because the majority of businesses in South Africa require these core IT services at reduced cost, we foresee exponential growth with this offering," said Jacques Loubser, Business Connexion General Manager: Cloud Infrastructure Services.
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