SMEs will get $5.8 million from Huawei South Africa as part of new cloud plans

A three-year head starts on its third data center availability zone and a $5.8 million (R100 million) Cloud Spark program to assist more than 1,000 small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) are just some of the recent announcements from Huawei South Africa.

For tech companies and small businesses alike, Cloud Spark is a hybrid accelerator program. Other SMEs can join, even if they don’t fall into one of the designated vertical focus areas.

In addition to financial, technical, training, and go-to-market support for all program participants, Huawei has partnered with the Silicon Cape organization to supply all participants with these services.

As part of Huawei Cloud’s “everything as a service” concept, both of these announcements were made.

The “Everything as a Service” strategy combines traditional cloud products like Infrastructure as a Service, Technology as a Service, and Expertise as a Service, according to Jay Zhou MD, Huawei Cloud South Africa, at the Huawei Eco-Connect event hosted at the Sandton Convention Centre last week. Thinking and behaving cloud-native, as well as implementing an all-digital, all-cloud, AI-driven mindset, is essential to this strategy

He stressed the importance of this is facing the challenges of the future. “In the future, sensors will replace our hands and feet, and the cameras will replace our eyes,” he said, adding that “students in rural areas will have the same learning experience as students in the city.”

According to CSO Ross Matthee, the company has shifted its own internal systems to Huawei Cloud as well as its customer deployments to Huawei Cloud.

There are more than 10 million customers in academic, corporate, and education verticals around the world using U-Learning, an online education company that has been in operation since 2006. Its goal is to make innovative education available in all classrooms, no matter where students learn.

Investment in cloud computing in South Africa has increased by 32% over the past year. According to Huawei, this expansion has allowed the company to keep expanding its availability zones (AZs) in South Africa. The company plans to open its third AZ in 2020, which will reduce cloud latency to 20ms.

This “Everything as a Service” philosophy, which is a critical component of Huawei Cloud, must benefit both large corporations like Huawei and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). For this reason, it has created Cloud Spark, an attempt to bring together the best of cloud computing.

Zhou ended his speech by concluding, “We are going to build a smart ecosystem in South Africa for South Africa.”