Huawei- First in Africa

Just 24 hours before Microsoft, Huawei launched its Cloud Data Centers in South Africa. The company announced that the facilities are now operational and available to customers in all regions of interest. This makes the Chinese Tech Giant, Huawei; the first active cloud provider in the whole of Africa.

Although, Huawei announced last year that the facility would be available in December, 2018, it however made no significant difference as the services are now coming in about 3 months after. Same extension seem to have affected Microsoft as they also exhibited such delay thereby opening announcing theirs just a day after that of Huawei.

“Like all Huawei Cloud data centers, the South African facility complies with tier 3+ standards and uses Huawei’s high-performance chips and network devices to offer a better user experience.”

Edward Deng, VP, Huawei Cloud Business, reiterated that South Africa is one of the most diverse and promising emerging markets globally, with tremendous potential, and cloud services are expected to unleash the latent capacity and drive the growth in the country. This of course, opens the African market to Huawei Cloud Services.

Huawei announced that they are leasing a partner’s data center in Johannesburg from where the company is deploying localized public cloud services based on local industry policies, customer requirements and partner conditions however, increasing their presence in that locality.

“We are looking forward to Huawei Cloud’s innovative technologies and services, such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence assisting African governments, carriers, and enterprises in a variety of industries such as finance, energy, agriculture, to leapfrog to a fully-connected, intelligent era.” Huawei added.

The South African data center will add to Huawei’s 40 availability zones across 23 regions globally. They also indicated interest in gradually developing more data centers in other regions within the continent such as Kenya and Nigeria, amongst others.

Microsoft however, came second in Africa with the opening of its first twin data centers in South Africa. This puts Microsoft ahead of Amazon Web Services, whose data center is expected in Africa by 2020.