The cloud’s the limit as Big Tech brings in data centres
In the next few days, Google will announce a new Sub-Saharan African partnership that it says will extend the reach of the Google Cloud Platform across the continent.
This comes as SA prepares for the arrival of the first Amazon Web Services data centres on the continent, and as Microsoft beds down its Azure data centres in the country.
There is no debate that the arrival of these “hyperscale” data centres will make a huge impact on the ability of South African businesses to operate more efficiently and costeffectively via the cloud. The question is just how much.
Microsoft has now had six months to test the impact of its Azure data centres in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Lillian Barnard, who took over as MD of Microsoft SA in the week that the company opened the data centres, says the arrival of such massive resources has woken businesses to the need for skills to address digital change.
“Most customers with whom I’ve engaged had projects under way to make sure they were ready to move to the cloud, but for industries as a whole it was totally new,” she says. “We realised we need to add value to customers by driving enterprise skilling initiatives.”
The reward will come down to what Harvard Business Review termed “innovation at scale”: the ability to achieve repeatable and sustainable organic growth from new products, services and business models that build on the core business. In the past, however, it required massive infrastructure to support this growth.
“With the arrival of the data centres, innovation at scale means you don’t have to
think about the infrastructure any more,” says Barnard.
“You can move into the cloud and innovate your processes right away. This is when we talk about being able to innovate much quicker, but also at scale, and you can grow in an unprecedented fashion.”
Prior to the arrival of the data centres, Microsoft commissioned a study by the International Data Corporation (IDC) that showed the arrival of hyperscale would grow public cloud spending from R3.4bn in 2017 to R11.5bn in 2022.
“More and more businesses will drive new revenue streams, and the opportunity to grow will be enormous. The revenue benefit is expected to be to the tune of R80bn. Imagine what that means in terms of jobs. IDC says there is the potential for 120,000 new jobs. We believe the Microsoft ecosystem will contribute 53,000 of those.”
The power of its ecosystem is its partner network, which itself produces new solutions and identifies new use cases.
“Whenever we innovate, our channel also has the opportunity to grow. We estimate that, for every $1 we create, the channel can create $8. We traditionally sold with partners, then had a strategy to work with them to co-create solutions. Now we go to market with partners, taking a catalogue of partner solutions to customers.”
The significance of this in a hyperscale world is that South African partners will now have direct access to partners in the rest of the world. And that will truly mean business at scale.
Imagine what that means … There is the potential for 120,000 new jobs