T-Systems South Africa and Huawei announced at the Huawei Eco-Connect Conference in Sandton today an industry disrupting partnership that will bring Open Telekom Cloud (OTC) to South Africa.
OTC is a simple, secure and affordable Open Stack Public Cloud platform that will deliver on-demand, pay as you go cloud services to enterprises. With the advent of industry 4.0 and the digitalisation of organisations, OTC will bring the best of global cloud innovation to South Africa and will enable South African organisations to operate and compete on a global scale.
Gert Schoonbee, Managing Director of T-Systems South Africa, said that “This extended partnership with Huawei, allows us to bring a new level of innovation to the local market. As a multi cloud provider, we have already been delivering high levels of service quality and price compatibility from our current local Datacentres; OTC will enhance our cloud portfolio and allow us to offer hyper scale computing capabilities on the open stack platform that can rival other global cloud offerings. Given that we are deploying OTC locally in South Africa, we will be retaining the revenue in the country, moreover, it enables us to fully comply with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI). In all, we are ecstatic about this as it brings simplicity, security and affordability to our customers.”
Schoonbee, speaking at a press conference at the Eco-Connect conference, said that “Our intention is to bring OTC to the rest of Africa, South Africa is just phase 1.”
Commenting on the partnership, Huawei Channel Director of Huawei Enterprise Business Group for Southern Africa, Daniel Liu, says, “Huawei has enjoyed a successful partnership with leading global ICT provider, T-Systems, working together on the OTC offering in European and Asian markets. T-Systems South Africa has a strong focus on delivering quality ICT to South Africa and African markets and together we aim to focus on accelerating digital transformation within these borders.”
T-Systems South Africa has been offering secure end-to-end cloud solutions since 2005, from consulting, implementation, billing and customer service through to maintenance. In early 2017, T-Systems South Africa was presented with the MDs award at the SAP Partner awards, and is one of a handful of SAP partners that is certified to offer a SAP Partner Managed Cloud. With OTC, the ICT solutions provider plans to extend its cloud solution offering with a growing strategic partner ecosystem that includes SAP, Microsoft, Huawei and Oracle.
“Our customers are discovering the advantages of the public cloud, but they want a local alternative,” said Gert Schoonbee. “With the Open Telekom Cloud we can offer a local solution that is simple, secure, affordable, and, that will benefit from the international R&D and development road map of Deutsche Telekom.”
T-Systems and Huawei plan to start taking customers onto OTC in the 4th Quarter of 2017.
Staff Writer
