Managed services model accelerates in Africa

More and more businesses across Africa are making the move towards cloud and subsequently, managed services. No longer just a buzzword, cloud has become a hot commodity and organisations are migrating based on the benefits.

In fact, according to Pieter Potgieter, Senior Manager: Commercial Operations at Britehouse, the African market is at a point where there is no hesitation and uncertainty around cloud, rather businesses are embracing its adoption to help them grow.

“This is driving businesses to adopt more of a menu-focused model – using and paying for only what they need – and adopting a managed service approach to bring everything together,” says Potgieter. “As a specialist IT consultancy that focuses on the implementation, development, hosting and management of SAP software-based solutions, Britehouse have created a flexible, secure, high performance platform for delivering hosted SAP applications as a managed service to businesses throughout Africa, using SUSE.”

Open source has become an integral part of the technology strategy of any business. The rise of cloud computing, big data, and even social networking has seen open source being recognised as the way of the future.

Potgieter agrees: “We are certainly seeing a positive construct when it comes to open source and SUSE. The adoption market has matured quite a bit and businesses are less worried about previous perceived open source pitfalls and rather see it now as a robust, secure and cost-effective hosting platform – especially when packaged into an enterprise solution.”

Business are also looking to modernize their application infrastructure and traditional monolithic platforms are not part of digital transformation and as a result, many businesses are re-evaluating their infrastructure priorities. “Clients are looking for stability, performance, service and security – and we believe SUSE meets these requirements,” adds Potgieter.

SUSE offers far higher performance and lower total cost of ownership. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, a leading Linux platform, optimised and resilient for SAP applications and databases, also uses less system resources and is more stable – keeping hardware costs low, while enabling high availability. Customers also benefit from economies of scale, getting a solution that would cost them much more to set up and run themselves.

“Better stability, peace of mind and improved service level are just some of the benefits African businesses are reaping from a managed service offering,” says Potgieter. “Additionally, with the skills gap hitting businesses hard, businesses want to be able to use the skills they have and apply them to more strategic areas of the business and this allows them to do exactly that. We see a very real merger of software and infrastructure as a service and a desperate need for the successful collaboration of these elements at a managed service level.”

“The current siloed-approach to infrastructure slows innovation and hinders go-to market strategies for companies, and this negatively impacts growth plans. As a result, companies are increasingly turning to solution providers to manage infrastructure, software and all things cloud related. However, to thrive in the digital era, businesses must act on opportunities and solve problems more quickly than ever before. They must innovate relentlessly and respond to customers, partners, and employees at light speed. Agility is the name of the game and SUSE allows business to unlock data intelligence, drive innovation and run with the best,” concludes Grant Bennett, Country Manager for SUSE South Africa & Sub-Saharan Africa.