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Telkom outlines cloud strategy

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 28 Mar 2014

Telkom Business is planning to grow its cloud computing market share in SA.

The fixed-line giant says it is leveraging its existing customer base as a channel to target customers for its cloud services.

As opposed to South African customers using cloud services from across the world, Telkom believes the timing is ideal, in terms of market readiness and maturity of technology, to roll out cloud services from its data centres.

It also notes that with the advent of the Protection of Personal Information Act as a regulatory driver and the fact that Telkom has data centres at its disposal, the company intends to leverage these factors in its favour.

Telkom says, until now, its business model has focused on partnering for growth, but a shift to build its own cloud infrastructure is necessary to capture the ever-growing cloud market share.

"Further, we have strengthened our current cloud position with delivering good cloud-based infrastructure services that are growing healthily. Going forward, we are developing services specially focused on SaaS service models, tailored to our customers' business software needs," the company says in response to e-mail questions sent by ITWeb.

"We have focused our efforts on developing robust and scalable models and platforms to deliver cloud services. We started a bit slower than our competitors and focused less on hype and more on value to our customers, the result of which is seen in our growing cloud services environment," it adds.

Also, by virtue of leveraging the existing Telkom base for new cloud services, the company says it has focused more on quality and developing longer-term relationships to drive its growth.

"In short, we are dealing with competition by driving our cloud business on strong, well-developed principles as a differentiator," it states.

During a recent tour of the Telkom data centre facilities in Centurion, Vaughn Naidoo - head of PAI at Telkom Business - said to support cloud adoption in SA, the company is driving connectivity.

"Telkom has over 150 000km of fibre laid within South Africa, giving organisations access to the bandwidth needed to support the cloud. And that is increasing every day. Indeed, we now have 10 times the fibre of all our competitors combined," he said.

"We are also increasing the options for users to access the cloud through our fixed/mobile convergence initiative. We are also driving the adoption of cloud through our ICT solutions delivered through our Cybernest arm, providing a full range of services from basic machine hosting through software-as-a-service right the way to full cloud-enabled outsourcing, enabling the delivery of flexible, cost-effective IT services."

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