When Huawei Cloud announced the establishment of a new region in South Africa, the Chinese technology giant became the world's first cloud service provider to operate a local data centre to provide cloud services in Africa. To accelerate the adoption of cloud in the country, MTN Business partnered with Huawei to build the data centre for Huawei’s Cloud infrastructure in Centurion, Gauteng.
According to Sudipto Moitra, General Manager: ICT at MTN Business, the partnership with Huawei in the cloud space is one that has been built with the interest of customers in mind. “Many people think of MTN as a telco only, but we have built on this legacy to form an unparalleled foundation of ICT services across Africa. The partnership with Huawei Cloud illustrates our commitment to providing an end-to-end solution for customers, and our capabilities of moving up the stack from just being a connectivity provider,” he says.
“Originally partnering to provide Huawei Cloud with easy access to local data centres, we have expanded this collaboration to various other affiliated projects, leveraging MTN’s core assets of network coverage and the roll-out of our 5G infrastructure. We know how to build world-class data centres, and operate them, having built around 30 regional data centres, some of them for our own switching houses, and we have extended this knowledge and expertise to help customers move their workloads from on-premises to public cloud.”
The success of the partnership has prompted both companies to look at further investments to provide a full digital platform to customers. These investments range from foundational technologies such as SD-WAN to a full Internet of things (IOT) ecosystem.
“Huawei Cloud has differentiated itself in the market by ensuring that clients have access to an end-to-end solution, and we are proud to have been able to facilitate that in the enterprise space to be relevant to all the market segments we serve,” Moitra says.
He adds that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of many companies across the continent, and in South Africa in particular. As a result, MTN Business and Huawei Cloud have seen increasing interest from local companies.
“As remote work and e-commerce become the norm, more companies are moving their workloads into the cloud. Many companies are using a multi-cloud strategy, with Huawei Cloud featuring prominently. In fact, there are a number of workloads and applications that are the right fit on the Huawei Cloud, and African businesses are starting to appreciate the benefits of this,” he explains.
According to Moitra, the local availability of Huawei Cloud, bundled with MTN’s connectivity, will assist multinational companies operating in Africa to enjoy uninterrupted operations – whether they are just initiating their African presence, or have been operating on the continent for some time. In addition, MTN and Huawei Cloud have the expertise and technologies to enable unique solutions for them. For example, mining operations can benefit from the operational technologies and AI capabilities that are being used in the Huawei Cloud in other areas of the world, to great effect.
“MTN Business and Huawei Cloud are proud to be able to offer a full end-to-end solution to help customers reach their strategic objectives and digital transformation goals. We are working together to improve availability across South Africa and the rest of Africa, and we are looking forward to expanding our cloud footprint, as well as continuing to deepen the partnership,” he concludes.
