Johannesburg, 19 May 2021
Managed services provider Seidor Networks has simplified operations, lowered costs and positioned itself for expansion across Africa through a move to Huawei Cloud.
Seidor Networks, a Platinum SAP Partner and a Huawei Cloud Consulting and Solution Partner, provides managed services ranging from monitoring, support and firewalling, to Internet connectivity, hosting and security services. Focusing on SAP B1 and providing fully managed SaaS services to customers in 19 industry verticals, Seidor Networks is the largest SAP B1 partner in Africa and is a Platinum SAP partner. The company also signed up as Huawei Cloud Consulting and Solution Partner in 2020.
As Seidor Networks (Africa) underwent significant growth and rapid expansion on the African continent, the company faced increasingly complex SAP workloads and growing demand for a variety of solutions. Seidor needed a more agile, resilient cloud platform and more cost-effective services that were easier to deploy and operate.
The company was challenged by increasing operational costs and low profit margins and limited O&M control, and required a dedicated local support team.
“We needed a more agile and elastic solution, but we didn't have time for all of the discussions involving architectural planning, machine sizing and procurement processes. Huawei Cloud assigned a professional business development and technical team to suit our requirements. That is why we decided to adopt Huawei Cloud,” says Darryl Maroun, Managing Director of Seidor Networks South Africa.
Seidor also sought to create new value through a multicloud strategy, which meant running workloads on AWS, Azure and Huawei Cloud. It also required logical multi-tenant billing to bill its customers for both the Huawei Cloud resources consumed and the SAP B1 SaaS services used.
The Huawei Cloud South Africa team worked closely with the Seidor infrastructure team and finalised Huawei Cloud IaaS architecture for SAP and SAP B1. The switch to Huawei Cloud was a huge weight off Seidor’s shoulders, especially during the COVID-19 crisis in spring 2020. Huawei Cloud provided a dedicated infrastructure team of IT experts to advise on best practices to simplify operations, reduce deployment time and slash operational and hosting costs.
Huawei Cloud integrated its platform with Morpheus, allowing Seidor to have a single pane of glass when managing its customers across multiple cloud platforms.
Huawei Cloud provided Seidor with a dedicated business development and technical team, providing guidance and recommendations when required, and also provides Seidor with continuous training and enablement sessions for hands-on experience and certification all as value-added services.
With most of the new customers of Seidor Networks’ SAP B1 landscape hosted on the Huawei cloud platform, availability was crucial. The Huawei cloud solution, comprising Elastic Cloud Servers, Object Storage Service, network services and database services, provides full security and regulatory compliance. Now with the second availability zone launched locally in Africa, Seidor can use other integrated services such as disaster recovery, backup and load balancing to increase the availability of services even further.
“These systems are critical. If they go down, it results in high financial losses. That’s why the move to Huawei Cloud marked a real milestone for us. Everything has been running smoothly and safely ever since,” said Juan Pierre Prinsloo, Infrastructure Manager of Seidor Networks.
"We were safe in the knowledge that our systems would be stable and available at all times. The speed of the cloud made it possible to effectively and efficiently manage systems while working from home,” said Terrence Chowles, Project Director of Seidor Networks South Africa.
The improved support services made operations and control easier than ever, and maintenance time was shortened by 30%. In addition, Seidor Networks went on to move ERP workloads to Huawei Cloud, leading to a 20% reduction in operations and management costs compared to when using similar infrastructure services from AWS.
Seidor Networks is now positioned to quickly expand into East and West Africa, and this year, Seidor uses Huawei Cloud’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to create a fully integrated control model. Seidor is also pursuing some other ambitious plans like multicloud orchestration, and it will potentially use more Huawei Cloud services to drive its business forward.
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