The awards seek to recognise outstanding achievements, excellence and growth within the partner organisations that support the delivery of digital transformation solutions to Africa’s public and private sector.

With customers across sectors expecting impactful, adoptable AI solutions, 麻豆原创鈥檚 partner network lined up for seats at this year鈥檚 麻豆原创 Africa Partner Kick-Off meeting, which precedes the awards ceremony held later in the evening.

Nazia Pillay, Head of Partner Ecosystem at 麻豆原创 Middle East and Africa, says this year’s awards take place at a time when Africa’s business landscape is being reshaped by the growing adoption of powerful cloud technologies and the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence. 鈥淎s public and private sector enterprises across the continent build new capabilities to meet changing customer demands and eliminate efficiency and uncertainty, the support of experienced, insightful and value-driven technology and implementation partners will be crucial to their success.”

Shaun Reuben, Global Partner Solutions Director at Microsoft South Africa, commented. 鈥淐ongratulations to all the winners at this year鈥檚 麻豆原创 Africa Partner Awards. Microsoft and 麻豆原创 have enjoyed 30 years of successful, value-driven collaboration and we have a mutual understanding and respect for our extensive and talented partner networks. Our joint AI capabilities empower organisations to run intelligent and frictionless enterprises powered by scalable cloud solutions. Together, we hope to continue delivering an accelerated path to growth and innovation for all our partners and customers on the African continent.鈥�

The 麻豆原创 Africa Partner Awards were established to recognise excellence in 麻豆原创’s partner ecosystem throughout the continent. This year’s awards recognise outstanding achievements in six distinct categories, with a strong focus on cloud-related capabilities, implementations and innovations. Winners are selected from the broader partner network and evaluated according to strict criteria.

The winners at this year’s 麻豆原创 Africa Partner Awards are:

• Vodacom, winner of the Rising Star category, which recognises the number and value of cloud books for a new partner onboarded in the past year;
• Deloitte and Dimension Data, joint winners of the Innovation Award;
• Tano Digital Solutions, which claimed the Top Cloud Performance category, recognising the value of cloud bookings and the number of cloud deals secured;
• Deloitte, winner of the Go Lives category, which recognises the number of customer go-lives;
• Epi-Use Africa, winner of the Top Capacity Growth category for the percentage increase in certified cloud consultants and the amount of training conducted within their business; and
• ITGest, which won the NNN category recognising the number of net-new sales and the value of net-new deals.

“We extend our thanks to our amazing partners for their incredible work supporting Africa’s digital transformation and cloud ambitions while maintaining the very highest levels of excellence and expertise,” says Pillay. “We look forward to continuing our close collaboration as we meet the growing demand for expert digital transformation and cloud services in Africa’s vibrant economy.”

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A study by data analytics firm IDC found that spending on public cloud services will nearly triple over the next five years, from R4,29-billion in 2017 to R 11,53-billion in 2022.

We are seeing a phenomenal uptake of public cloud across a spectrum of businesses; from micro organisations that want to back up their data to the cloud in a cost-effective way, to the most complex ones such as financial services organisations that are using Microsoft Azure as the foundation to drive new levels of productivity, create intelligent data-driven experiences and deepen business trust.

Businesses need to be agile, move quickly and respond to market demand. The power of the cloud allows them to drive agility and speed, but it also enables them to be flexible, which is important in these challenging and uncertain times.

Organisations that are scaling back or ramping up their products and services can leverage the power of the cloud and an opex model to respond accordingly.

Those businesses that run an on-premise IT environment are struggling to put in place plans that will allow their employees to work remotely coupled with the necessary business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

However, the reality is that many businesses are going to be in a hybrid state for some time as their IT environments are evolving and becoming increasingly complex.

听Managing a hybrid state and the edge

Applications are running on different hardware across on-premise datacentres, multiple clouds and the edge.

Exxaro Resources, one of South Africa鈥檚 largest heavy minerals mining companies, moved its headquarters to a new green building and migrated its on-premise datacentre to Azure, effectively reducing the entire company鈥檚 energy footprint while increasing both its data security and operational agility.

All mining sites located in dispersed rural locations, where connectivity is an issue, are now connected directly to Azure. This move cuts out a bespoke model where the sites were connected to the corporate building in the past, with the aim of creating a digital mining company.

Managing disparate environments at scale, ensuring uncompromised security and enabling developer agility and innovation are critical to success. Hybrid cloud capabilities must therefore evolve to enable innovation anywhere, while providing a seamless development, deployment and ongoing management experience.

We have introduced Azure Arc for businesses that want to simplify complex and distributed environments. It includes a set of platforms and tools that allow companies to manage their multi-cloud environment, from on-premise applications to those running in Azure or even on the edge.

More importantly, it allows them to manage other hyperscale cloud environments and helps them deal with the administration burden of running a multi-cloud environment.

听Driving innovation

The increased utilisation of public cloud services and the additional investments into private and hybrid cloud solutions will continue to enable South African organisations to focus on innovation and building digital businesses at scale.

We are seeing significant growth for 麻豆原创 on Azure. We offer on-premise 麻豆原创 customers the ability to take their workloads into Azure as part of the Project Embrace initiative between Microsoft and 麻豆原创 announced last year. It is centred around the customer journey to 麻豆原创 S/4HANA and 麻豆原创 Cloud Platform on Microsoft Azure.

One such customer is Standard Bank South Africa that is making the move to significantly improve the experience customers have with the bank, while enabling it to introduce new solutions to market more efficiently.

The work that we are doing with Standard Bank is the first local demonstration of this partnership and 麻豆原创 on Azure is one of the fastest growing services that we run locally in Azure.

Additionally, several organisations have decided to move their developer environments into Azure. The acquisition of GitHub and the massive global community that comes with it, sets our customers up for success in terms of driving their developer environments in the cloud.

The presence of local听cloud听technology means more opportunity for economic growth and innovation. Some of the innovation we鈥檙e driving are cognitive services and the Internet of Things (IoT), which accelerates customers鈥� digital transformation and opens the door to build interesting applications.

An example is AB InBev South Africa that is improving its cooler management and gaining new insights with IoT.

听Enabling innovation through partners

Our partners remain key to our strategy and are at the forefront of building solutions that will enable business innovation and digital transformation.

We believe that local service providers will continue to find ways to drive their value.听Managed service providers are showcasing innovation in how they鈥檙e levering the power of the public cloud to extend their services and value proposition to customers.

They see the presence of hyperscale platforms as positive for the market because it enables them to provide customers with cloud solutions that might not otherwise be available.

Whether organisations are adopting a pure or hybrid cloud solution, this move will enable the foundation to drive digital transformation, reduce costs, gain insights and achieve business innovation.听

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