SPONSORED: Pinnacle has evolved into being a value-added distributor and has prepared itself to offer more services and solutions, with cloud firmly part of the offering.
Huawei Cloud is supporting Pinnacle’s strategic drive to offer more value-add to its partner network and, ultimately, end-customer markets.
The company became a Huawei Cloud distributor in 2019 and recently concluded an agreement with the Huawei Consumer Business Group to distribute its device solutions.
“I believe Huawei’s cloud offering has gained significant momentum in South Africa because they have put huge investment into localising their offering for this market,” says Pinnacle’s brand director, Fred Saayman. “They have also put significant marketing efforts into creating visibility to resellers, partners and end-customers. Huawei’s investment into local datacentres has demonstrated its commitment to South Africa and the African market.”
“Huawei has specific cloud solutions targeting multiple markets,” says Michael Langeveld, VP, Huawei Cloud (Southern Africa). “Businesses can reduce the cost of managing and maintaining IT systems by using the resources of cloud computing and solution providers such as Pinnacle.
“Huawei Cloud has demonstrated its efficacy and helped many South African customers, reducing their total cost of ownership up to as much as 50%.”
Saayman says Huawei’s datacentres also comply with Tier 3+ standards and Huawei Cloud offers highly competitive pricing as well as bundling in value-added services that typically would be at an additional cost with some of the other cloud vendors.
Langeveld agrees, adding that Huawei Cloud is a good example of how to get rapid service innovation. “Huawei Cloud has a large number of innovative technologies, such as IoT, blockchain and AI. Enterprises can purchase these services online to enable business innovation.”
Competitive advantage
“As Pinnacle, we have seen the value of expanding our ICT solutions and services offerings into our reseller and partner markets and we were looking at a strategic cloud vendor to partner with,” continues Saayman. “We’ve had a very successful relationship with the Huawei Enterprise Business Group and approached them about being a distributor in their cloud ecosystem.
“Now, our many partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) can position their solutions, hosted on the Huawei Cloud platform, affording both Pinnacle and Huawei Cloud a competitive advantage.
“Our partners and ISVs can cost-effectively market their specific solutions offerings on the Huawei Cloud, such as Securityas- a-Service (SaaS), Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and PABX-as-a-Service (PaaS). Huawei is a leader on all the other 200-plus service offerings that they have on their cloud. Huawei’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings are really well established,” says Saayman.
He adds that he sees South Africa still being in its infancy in the cloud market and believes there will be huge growth over the medium to long term, depending on the maturity of cloud in the business space as well as attractive and competitive offerings from vendors.
Langeveld adds that this cloud market has been growing at an average of around 20% over the past three years: “A strong performance in a context of elevated economic stress and relatively flat top line B2B ICT market growth.
“The growth will come from specific solution offerings and not necessarily from infrastructure cloud offerings. It does not make sense for every organisation to move to cloud and a more hybrid cloud environment will most probably provide a more balanced and cost-effective approach,” concludes Saayman.
