Huawei Vice President for Cloud Business Unit, Edward Deng
by MTHULISI SIBANDA
CAPE TOWN – GLOBAL information and communications technology infrastructure, Huawei, has launched its first public Cloud service in South Africa, set to provide organisations in the continent with lower-latency, reliable and secure services once available early next year.
The public Cloud data centre will be located in Johannesburg, with plans to open similar facilities in other economic strongholds including Kenya and Nigeria.
Company executives and South African government officials attended the launch in Cape Town on Wednesday.
Addressing media following the launch, essentially the expansion of Huawei Cloud to South Africa, Edward Deng, Vice President of Huawei Cloud Business Unit, said it was “the right moment” to expand such a service to the continent.
“I believe demand is high among our partners and customers. Huawei Cloud is confident Africa could be a big growth area,” an upbeat Deng said.
He mentioned such industries as finance, energy and agriculture to benefit from the public Cloud.
Representing government, Director-General of the Department of
Telecommunications and Postal Services, Robert Nkuna, said the launch of the Cloud services coincided with an exciting period in the country’s ICT sector.
This comes as Africa’s most advanced economy investing in skills
development, allocation of frequency spectrum and organising some
continental industry conferences.
“We’ll engage Huawei to transfer cloud technology skills to SA and the continent. We are convinced that we can fast track our development if we work in partnership with other stakeholders,” Nkuna told delegates.
Huawei Cloud also released the Africa Partnership Programme with local channel partners including Altron, ATOS, BCX, Datacentrix, EOH, Gijima, StorTech, TCM, Tech Mahindra, T-systems and XON.
In additional, Huawei also launched InTouch Aggregator, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) platform powered on Huawei Cloud, helping connect carriers, open up telecom capabilities, enable OTT, and build up the cloud ecosystem.
Edward Deng, Vice President of Huawei Cloud, said the business unit’s innovative technologies and services, such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence, would help African governments, carriers, and enterprises in a variety of industries such as finance, energy,
agriculture, to leapfrog to a fully-connected, intelligent era.
“With over 30 years of technical accumulation in ICT infrastructure and products, Huawei provides reliable, secure, and sustainable cloud services to customers worldwide,” Deng assured.
Since establishment in 2017, Huawei Cloud has unveiled more than 120 cloud services in 18 major categories.
The business unit officially launched stations in Hong Kong, Russia and Thailand.
It had ahead of the launch in South Africa stated the launch of the
facility in Johannesburg would boost digitalisation in the continent.
– CAJ News
