Johannesburg, 07 May 2019
A little over a month ago, Microsoft launched its much anticipated data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town. For corporates that prefer to store their data in South Africa, and for those that are legally required to do so, these facilities enabled unprecedented opportunity for cloud adoption in the local landscape.
And First Distribution, Africa's leading cloud distributor, was eager to share the benefits across its reseller and end-user network.
A month on and, in the wake of the hype around the launch of the data centres, how have they been received by the market?
According to Natasha Bezuidenhout, Microsoft Executive at First Distribution, there is uptake in partners looking to add the Azure offering to their stack and build out Azure practices. "From an end-user/customer perspective, we are definitely seeing more interest, although adoption is relatively slow as opportunities must first be filtered through reseller partners," says Bezuidenhout. She also notes that limitations to what Microsoft has enabled locally at this stage is impacting transition from other Azure geos, where particular workloads are not yet enabled in South Africa.
Despite typically slow South African uptake of new technologies, Bezuidenhout notes established Azure partners are finding more deployment and migration opportunities and anticipates continued ramp-up. To aid this transition, First Distribution has launched a set of Inside Azure technical sessions and Webinars to support partners with technical enablement. "We are also invested in the Microsoft SureStep programme, to help partners reach the relevant competencies to share in rebates as well as support them in scaling their Azure practices," says Bezuidenhout.
While the cloud has been around for a long time, local data centres present an opportunity to differentiate between public, private and hybrid cloud and enable a local, secure and ultimately seamless solution in which the best of all worlds is possible. Azure's ease of use from a backup and disaster recovery perspective is seeing greater traction, as is the move from onsite ERP environments to Azure. For example: Sage on Azure, Pastel on Azure and SAP on Azure, where customers are definitely seeing value from a cost saving and infrastructure benefit perspective, according to Bezuidenhout.
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