Vodacom, Cisco marry NIL for public cloud

Cisco is collaborating with the Vodacom and NIL for the first real public cloud offering in the Europe, 

Middle East and Africa region (EMEA).

By joining forces with Vodacom, leading provider of converged mobile communication solutions in Africa and NIL, a leading global provider of unified computing solutions, to launch the availability of the first office in the cloud, tagged ‘Vodacom Office in the Cloud’ will avail users the virtualization technology and hosted applications, to bring enterprise class IT services to businesses from small to large.

The Executive Head, Hosted Services, Vodacom, Mr. Richard Vester, affirmed this recently in Sun City, South Africa during the 2011 Cisco Expo, saying that Vodacom, Cisco and NIL already have a long established strategic business partnership with in South Africa and their three-way collaboration will strengthen this relationship and ultimately us to deliver innovative cloud services and solutions within the joint markets

He explained that ‘Vodacom Office in the Cloud’ is a complete managed office solution which enables customers to rent everything they  need for a fully functional office resulting in lower costs, less problems and allowing them more time for their core business.

The solution, he said, is primarily intended to support businesses by providing them with enterprise-class IT services that would otherwise not be available to them because of high costs such as high availability using redundant equipment, high performance, advanced security.

Cloud computing, he said, is profoundly transforming the way information and services are consumed and provided. With this new paradigm shift comes the opportunity to dynamically scale IT resources and make applications and services easier than ever to access.

“We are taking the concept of cloud computing and offering it in a turnkey solution that fits any business, regardless of size ...,” he said.

From start-up to established business, the customer can decide how many workstations are required, with which applications, and pay only for what they use,” he said.

Equally commenting, the head of Managed Services, NIL, Africa, Mr. Brett Orwin, said that his team at NIL has provisioned the cloud solution to allow Vodacom to deliver an affordable and efficient cloud solution over their infrastructure immediately as well as  providing a flexible and scalable portal to deliver a ‘choose and click’ suite of popular office and business applications.

The three-way collaboration between Cisco, Vodacom and NIL, he said, would enable companies to leverage next generation Cisco technology, both in the core switching, security and routing environment as well as the Unified Computing System server blade infrastructure.

And for channel director, Cisco South Africa, Mr. Stefano Mattiello, the collaboration delivers a cloud infrastructure is an important milestone for all three companies in South Africa.

In addition, he said, the collaboration is to server as organic to innovation, pointing out that for some time now Cisco has been partnering closely with service providers around the world to provide the cloud infrastructure that they can use to deliver innovative services including security, video and unified communications to their customers.

“By providing rich services within the cloud, the network becomes a platform – and a building block – for providing real value for customers. Our professional services approach involves helping customers build the cloud solutions they need to support their operations and customers,” he said.

Remmy Nweke

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