Oxide Cloud Services (OCS), a Data Sciences Corporation subsidiary, is bolstering its enterprise AI services through a collaboration with Digital Parks Africa (DPA) that gives OCS a private AI pod in the DPA Samrand data centre in Centurion.
Richard Raymond, Senior Engineering Consultant at Data Sciences Corporation, says the collaboration strengthens OCS’s AI value proposition and helps it better meet changing enterprise needs. He says the collaboration means OCS can now roll out enterprise AI infrastructure faster and support the growing local need for sovereign AI.
While OCS and DPA have a long-standing partnership, DPA’s flagship Tier III data centre in Samrand has now installed a dedicated AI pod for OCS, with redundant connectivity to its Teraco site, where it offers other cloud services and connectivity to customers who break out in Teraco.
The DPA data centre was selected for the OCS AI journey because it provides a total of 260KW for a pod and up to 50KW of power for each rack – more than 10 times the traditional data centre availability.
Raymond says: “Our collaboration underpins OCS’s AI enablement framework, through which we provide AI services to leading enterprises such as financial services companies, insurers and telcos. A key – and growing – demand we see in the market is for a sovereign AI enablement platform that allows organisations to build their own AI, manage their own AI workloads or leverage OCS AI services without having to be routed through international, public infrastructure.
“Our local cloud is fully South African hosted, built and designed for local enterprises,” he notes. “That means no data or IP leave South Africa’s borders. We offer our customers the ability to build their own AI solutions with access to ‘ready to go’ AI-enabling technologies. A customer can deploy entire AI pipelines in one place. Not just LLMs on GPUs, but high-bandwidth, low-latency networking services to keep the GPUs fed, multiple storage tiers for any RAG and ETL requirements and several key software services to stitch it all together. This enables customers to build solutions such as their own sovereign AI chatbots, trained on their organisation’s actual information, data and processes, and therefore understand their business requirements. We see absolutely massive demand for this, as every major enterprise is trying to enable their teams and launch innovative new services using AI. But compliance and security are top concerns for them.”
OCS AI Services is growing to meet this demand. “Our AI as a service and GPU as a service have been providing AI capabilities to several organisations for several years. We are also piloting several new technologies that promise to further improve any organisation’s AI adoption – so stay tuned,” he says.
Data Sciences Corporation (the company behind OCS) is an enterprise IT specialist with over a decade of providing services to a large proportion of the country's largest organisations.
With its access to the premier level of global IT technologies, strong collaborative integrated partnerships with those international technology providers – in particular, in this case, its Registered Partner status with the current market leader in GPU/AI technologies, Nvidia – positions the company to help build local AI hardware stacks that can scale to enterprise needs.
Says Raymond: “As we expand the offering, we are also layering on the software services that are often necessary to get teams consuming the services at the level they need, rather than being stuck in the plumbing. The DPA offering has aligned with our vision, giving us the power and the space we need to grow and support our customers in the AI era.”
Engineered for AI success
Raymond emphasises that harnessing AI requires more than GPUs and LLMs. He says: “One of the huge oversights that almost every company seems to make when they kick off their AI journey is that they just go out and buy several GPUs. The problem is that if the AI solution isn't architected correctly and they don't have the right levels of high-speed networking and storage, they can’t take full advantage of their investments. People very often miss that architectural leap when they begin these AI journeys, and that's something we provide out of the gate.
"Another major value proposition for us is that we provide very skilled engineers on call.
“We design on enterprise-first technologies, but critically, spend time with our customers helping them build out their cloud and AI journeys. For security and isolation, when we onboard our larger clients, we can create their own private, bespoke isolated network that becomes an extension of their own network. We are listed on the Teraco Cloud Exchange as one of the cloud vendors alongside the likes of Azure and AWS,” he says. “Because we offer enterprise support for our customers as well, they know they'll typically have direct lines into the teams they need access to.”
In addition to AI sovereignty, OCS customers also benefit from local, rand-based pricing. Raymond says: “Because we purchase the technology and we deploy it all here, we're not linked to any international currency and exchange rates, and we don't have variable pricing from one day to the next. We capex the hardware, and we know all the costs of our licensed products upfront, preconfigured and built into our costing model. So we are able to offer predictability in the pricing.”
Share
