Storage company EMC has signed a strategic partnership with local ICT solutions provider StorTech to meet the demand as cloud computing gains popularity in SA.
StorTech opened the EMC Velocity2 Signature Solution Centre in Rivonia last week, after signing up as a tier 1 solution centre partner, in terms of EMC's Velocity cloud computing programme.
The StorTech/EMC partnership will see StorTech acting as an extension of EMC and driving EMC cloud solutions into the market as well as building additional storage solutions to host small and medium-size enterprise (SME) software applications and data on-site and off-site.
Vodacom currently holds a majority stake (51%) in StorTech, which it acquired last year. According to StorTech CEO, Tim Knowles, the deal was part of StorTech and Vodacom's joint plans to become major players in the local cloud arena.
Beyond storage
Knowles explains that the partnership has resulted in StorTech no longer being a storage company only, but an end-to-end ICT solutions provider. He adds that StorTech has made significant investments and is a different company to the one it was a year ago.
“This is due to our strategic investment in training and skills development. We have doubled our staff complement to 160 people over the last year.”
In addition, in the past year, the company has signed up and certified eight major technology partners.
2 Signature Solution Centre is EMC's solution for virtualised Microsoft Exchange Environments, which is designed to reduce management complexity and costs within the e-mail life cycle while managing rapid e-mail volume growth.
Growing interest
Christian Putz, partner sales director for EMC Europe, Middle East and Africa, says the StorTech partnership is the company's most recent push to provide cloud services to local SMEs.
According to Putz, EMC has 31 solution centres across the EMEA region. In SA, there are now three distributors offering EMC solution centres, namely Business Connection, Dimension Data and now StorTech. In 2005, EMC only had five solution centres.
In November last year, EMC joined VMware and Cisco to form the VCE Alliance, a move by the tech companies to provide modular cloud solutions for the mid-market and enterprise level.
Steven Ambrose, MD of World Wide Worx Strategy, says by 2015, SA will reach between 10 million and 12 million broadband Internet users. So far this year, there are 6.3 million broadband Internet users in SA.
Ambrose says: “Consumers are already in the cloud in the form of applications such as Gmail. But from a business point of view, it will become pervasive most certainly in part (as a hybrid model of public and private cloud).”
The increasing number of Internet users plus high capacity broadband and cheaper Internet costs will fuel business' interest in investing in cloud computing, according to Ambrose.
“Both consumers and business users are expecting nothing less than instant gratification and real-time access. Cloud will drive the integration of all business tools such as SOA, BI and CRM and business will need to get all the systems to work together.”
Ambrose explains that the recent roll-out of international high-capacity fibre optic cables is driving a data revolution where SA now has 150 times the Internet capacity it had in 2008.
“The biggest driver of ADSL subscriber growth has been specifically in the SME space,” he adds. “More people now access the Internet via SMEs than large corporate networks.”
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