T-Systems South Africa announced on Tuesday 3 October 2017 at their InTouch 2017 event that they will be partnering with Microsoft to offer Azure services to enterprise customers in the South African market. T-Systems, already a global partner of Microsoft, will be focusing on complementing their existing solutions with Microsoft Azure cloud services to create additional value for customers.
Rajan Padayachee, Head of Solutions, Projects and Portfolio at T-Systems South Africa speaking on the investment said: “Shortly after we announced our intention to bring our Open Telekom Cloud (OTC) to South Africa, Microsoft announced that they will be offering Azure from local data centres in South Africa. Considering our strong partnership with them, coupled with the substantial investments that many of our customers have already made in Microsoft services, T-Systems made the decision to invest in Microsoft’s local Azure cloud, with the intention to maximise our customers’ investments and build on our partnership with Microsoft.”
According to Padayachee, T-Systems plans to invest extensively in their Microsoft’s Azure capabilities and offerings, a significant sum which underpins their determination to become an important Azure Partner in South Africa.
“Azure opens up the door for a new era of innovation. We will be able to leverage the sheer computing power of hyperscale to offer customers critical business systems, such as SAP, on a consume as you need basis. Overlaid with T-Systems’ cloud solutions, such as Cloudifier, Azure migration Factory etc., customers can benefit from fast, simple and seamless migrations, enabling and accelerating their innovation cycles,” added Padayachee.
Zoaib Hoosen, Managing Director of Microsoft South Africa supports T-Systems’ investment, stating, “T-Systems South Africa has been a longstanding partner of Microsoft for many years. We view this agreement as a reaffirmation of both our global and local partnership and we give credit to the value that T-Systems’ brings, with both their extensive cloud experience and their existing partnerships with other entrenched business critical solution vendors.”
On T-Systems’ intentions with OTC, Gert Schoonbee, Managing Director T-Systems South Africa, concluded stating that: “At this point, we are focused firmly on establishing Azure as our primary hyperscale cloud partner. The main driver for our original OTC decision was the association with a hyperscale cloud hosted in South Africa. Microsoft Azure will address this need.”
Edited by Dean Workman
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