CIOs across SA and the rest of Africa are moving to hybrid cloud, but cost is not their main motivator, delegates heard at an IBM IaaS Showcase Executive Forum in Johannesburg this week.
Ulli Reyneke, sales and distribution enterprise CAMSS leader at IBM SA, says research shows that, unlike CIOs elsewhere in the world, South African CIOs are looking to hybrid cloud deployments for reasons other than cost efficiencies alone.
"Businesses want to be agile, but at the same time, they are looking to quality infrastructure and services and they need to position themselves for growth. These are the main drivers for hybrid cloud adoption now."
Indran Naick, ecosystem development senior certified architect and IBM master inventor, agrees. "The African market is adopting cloud primarily for speed of execution, not for cost control. Cloud gives Africa a stepping stone to growth," he says.
Through cloud, start-ups and business disruptors have instant access to as much computer power as a Fortune 500 company does, speakers said, giving innovators an unprecedented opportunity to compete with established enterprises on an equal footing.
Naick says to be successful in future, businesses will have to focus on their differentiation. "Everything outside of this differentiation, you buy - not build," he says.
Showcasing the IBM SoftLayer infrastructure and Bluemix cloud app development platform, IBM outlined how local enterprises could move to flexible hybrid cloud architectures and rapidly build and deploy cloud applications and services.
Reyneke says IBM's portfolio of cloud solutions encompass IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and business process as a service (BPaaS) solutions to help its clients move to a world where applications are being integrated to create new products and services, quickly and flexibly.
"Now there are no more excuses standing in the way of innovation: the infrastructure and services are here to enable you to innovate in hours or days, not weeks or months," says Naick.
The IBM IaaS Showcase Executive Forum was the third in a series of cloud executive forums presented by IBM in partnership with ITWeb.
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