Huawei Cloud to be available by year-end in South Africa

Chinese technology giant Huawei has revealed its plans to create a cloud region in South Africa. It will launch the offering commercially before the end of the year.

TechCentral reported earlier this month that Huawei plans to build a data centre facility in Johannesburg to provide public cloud services, becoming the latest multinational after Microsoft and Amazon.com to unveil such plans. But it may beat its US rivals to launch, despite announcing its intentions last.

It will use the South African facility to provide cloud services to countries in Southern Africa and said it also plans to unveil more new regions in Africa in time.

“Huawei Cloud South Africa region will start providing cloud services at the end of this year, allowing organisations operating inside South Africa and its neighbouring countries to access lower-latency, reliable and secure cloud services such as Elastic Cloud Server, Elastic Volume Service and Object Storage Service,” it said in a statement.

At an event in Cape Town on Wednesday, Huawei announced that its cloud business has partnered with local technology companies Altron, ATOS, BCX, Datacentrix, EOH, Gijima, StorTech, TCM, Tech Mahindra, T-systems and XON to offer solutions.

It has also launched InTouch Aggregator, a platform as a service, which helps connect telecommunications carriers and open up capabilities such as over-the-top services like video streaming.

Huawei Cloud and its partners’ now cover Southeast Asia, Europe, Latin America, Russia, Africa and China with 22 regions and 37 availability zones.

Eighteen categories

Huawei Cloud was established in March 2017. Since then, it has unveiled more than 120 cloud services in 18 major categories. These cover more than 60 general solutions, including SAP, high-performance computing, Internet of things, security, development operations and over 80 industry scenario solutions, including manufacturing, e-commerce, gaming, finance and Internet of vehicles.

It has been launched with facilities in Hong Kong, Russia and Thailand in 2018. By the end of September 2018, it provided services in Asia-Pacific and partner public cloud services in Europe and Latin America, outside of the Chinese market.

Huawei Cloud and Huawei partner public cloud are available in 14 countries and regions, and will be available in most of the major regions around the world by end of 2018, it said.

The company said that ultimately there will be five major cloud platforms in the world and promised it would be one of those five.

The location of the Johannesburg data centre has not yet been disclosed. It also hasn’t disclosed how much it is investing in launching the service in the region.

The move comes as Microsoft gears up to launch two Azure data centres in South Africa, also by the end of the year, one in Cape Town and the other in Johannesburg.

Last month, the world’s biggest cloud provider, Amazon Web Services, said it will also open data centre facilities in South Africa. The new AWS “infrastructure region” will be launched in the first half of 2020 and will allow customers to run workloads in South Africa and serve end users across the African continent with lower latency. — (c) 2018 NewsCentral Media