Johannesburg, 29 Mar 2022
In its bid to secure a greater share of South Africa’s cloud market, Huawei Cloud South Africa will leverage its alliance with distributor Pinnacle and intensify its focus on its local ecosystem to drive growth and move ahead of competition.
Pinnacle signed up as a Huawei Cloud distributor in 2020 and the relationship between the companies has been strengthened after Pinnacle secured distribution rights to the complete Huawei Consumer Business Group product stack in September last year.
The partnership with Pinnacle is very important to Huawei and its ambitions within the local market. The Pinnacle Huawei Cloud team includes Stefan van Niekerk, Huawei Product Manager for Server, Storage and Cloud, and Charlene Oosthuizen, Pinnacle Cloud Solutions Manager.
The teams work closely together to reinforce the overall value proposition, especially in use cases within e-learning, backup and disaster recovery, CCTV and storage, fintech and Huawei’s AI Call Centre infrastructure and solution.
Both companies have technical expertise, market experience and product knowledge that – when combined – represents a powerful technology force that can address all requirements linked to cloud solution migration and application.
Pinnacle also offers flexible cloud usage options and, together with Huawei, can assist clients in the process of adopting and applying the most appropriate cloud strategy.
South Africa has been identified as its most important market in Africa and Huawei Cloud South Africa Managing Director Jay Zhou believes that it is in the cloud where digital transformation is actually taking place.
The partners fuel Huawei SA’s cloud ecosystem and this focus is supporting Huawei’s drive to secure at least 10% share of the South African market, as well as reduce latency and establish one network in the southern African region.
Huawei and Pinnacle teams work closely to drive the benefits of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to the market. They share the view that customers rely on the expertise and technical capabilities of partners to cement the advantages of cloud solution roll-out and application. Both companies highlight the importance of guiding customers with their digital journeys, strategy development and execution.
“We want to reduce the latency between different continents and different countries. So we want people in Nigeria or in Zambia or in Kenya to enjoy the service supplied by South Africa,” said Zhou. “That is why we have built many different pop sites. The target is under 100 milliseconds, but in South Africa it is much less than that.”
Both companies believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to integrate into solutions going forward and both have identified application of AI and data analytics within cloud strategies as a significant opportunity.
Zhou added that the company will also leverage ‘everything as a service’, a two-pronged strategy based on technical as a service (the latest technologies including AI and big data) and through ongoing R&D, make these available to the commercial market. The second prong is experience as a service (the company’s technology used within key markets like cloud, fintech, CCTV and AI-based call centre environments).
According to Zhou, a core component of the company’s strategy is to rely on its own technical capability and market experience.
“We want to use our experience (and make it) available on cloud… for example, our database. Currently we use Oracle’s database, but in the future we will change it to Huawei’s own database, developed by ourselves.”
AI in the cloud
Huawei Cloud South Africa and Pinnacle plan to focus more on the relevance of artificial intelligence in cloud solutions and, as Pinnacle puts it, to help the market ‘grow with intelligence’.
Pinnacle CEO Tim Humphreys-Davies said the company intends to focus more on AI and data analytics in general, but also applications within specific key verticals including education and healthcare.
Huawei has also identified these verticals as important target markets in the roll-out of cloud solutions.
Irrespective of how, when or where the cloud service market grows, there is no doubt that Huawei and Pinnacle will be at the forefront of service delivery.
Follow Huawei Cloud South Africa on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube or e-mail us at huaweicloudsa@huawei.com.
Share