Standard Bank is offering a free online Microsoft Digital Literacy Course to all South Africans in partnership with Pioneering Solutions Studio.
The courses focus on generic ICT skills and concepts. How to use a computer and the Internet. keeping yourself and your computer safe online. As well as how to use the most common Microsoft productivity software applications (Word, Excel and PowerPoint).
The online course is open to all South Africans during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. You also don’t need to have a Standard Bank account to use the platform. It explores a range of digital skills and practices over four key modules. Providing the learner with the ability to utilise technology to interact with the world around them.
To register, learners will need a device, such as a phone, tablet or computer, with internet connectivity, a valid email address, together with their South African ID number. Learners that do not have an email address can register for a free Microsoft Outlook email account from the platform. Upon completion they will be issued with a Microsoft Imagine Academy certificate. This certificate will allow South African’s to claim recognition of prior learning in Digital Literacy at any institution of higher learning.
According to United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), there are nearly 1.4 billion students globally who can’t attend school and university as a result of COVID-19. Millions of people around the world are also unable to work as a result of quarantine and lockdowns.
In its latest Global Shapers Report, the World Economic Forum referred to online learning as the future of education. StatsSA’s most recent Labour Force Survey shows upskilling courses significantly increase the likelihood of employment. With more employers favouring employees that have had continuous development as professionals.
In today’s digital world, nearly every career requires digital communication at some point. Standard Bank believes that equipping yourself with the skills to effectively and responsibly find, evaluate, communicate and share online content is key to your future. “You need a certain level of digital literacy to turn on your computer. So that you can connect with loved ones but require different skills to locate and complete an online job application. Standard Bank wants you to be digital literacy savvy, whether you bank with us or not”.
The course will continue to be available post the lockdown period. To learn more about the Microsoft Digital Literacy course – visit learn section on the Standard Bank website.
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Standard Bank South Africa is moving its core SAP Cloud Platform services to Microsoft Azure to significantly improve customer experience.
This accelerates the digital transformation of SAP customers to S/4HANA by partnering with Microsoft and using jointly developed reference architectures, roadmaps, and industry best practices. Many enterprises are looking to reduce their reliance on their own datacentres and moving more of their core workloads to the cloud.
Sabelo Nkwanyana, Standard Bank’s CIO for Personal and Business Banking SA, says leveraging the computing power of Microsoft and the product innovation capability of SAP demonstrates how Standard Bank is embracing partnerships and ecosystems to develop customised solutions for its clients.
“SAP has a deep understanding of our business requirements and how we want to ensure our customers are happy with our service offering. This partnership continues our focus on innovation by leveraging the respective skills of SAP and Microsoft to transform the digitisation and personalisation journey for our customers,” says Nkwanyana.
Lillian Barnard, Managing Director, Microsoft South Africa says, “The Project Embrace initiative between Microsoft and SAP announced globally last year is centred around the customer journey to SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud Platform on Microsoft Azure. The work that we are doing with Standard Bank is the first local demonstration of this partnership, and another milestone in the journey Microsoft is on with Standard Bank, to bring innovation into every aspect of the bank’s IT system and enable enriched interactions with the bank’s customers.”
The partnership brings together SAP and Microsoft, along with a global network of selected system integrators, to move on-premise SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA customers to the cloud through industry-specific best practices, reference architectures and cloud-delivered services.
Barnard continues, “Enterprises are migrating to cloud providers at an accelerated rate. This makes it critical for our customers to have the right cloud infrastructure in place, enabling them to unlock the power of innovation. Microsoft’s significant investment on the African continent, with our first hyperscale datacentre regions in Johannesburg and Cape Town, means many more partners and customers are enjoying the benefits of our intelligent cloud platform.”
Speaking on the SAP partnership specifically, Barnard adds, “Project Embrace has three tenets at its heart: simplify, accelerate and innovate. By accelerating our customers’ digital transformation journey, we are enabling them to become agile, efficient digital enterprises on Microsoft Azure – with a cloud platform optimised for SAP – leveraging best practice and specialist expertise.”
“Today’s announcement is the biggest partnership centred on SAP implementation in Africa. With client experience a key strategic pillar for Standard Bank, Project Embrace reflects the shared commitment of both SAP and Microsoft to accelerate our customers’ journey to the cloud,” says Cathy Smith, Managing Director at SAP Africa.
This project will deliver a unified approach to how Standard Bank runs SAP S/4HANA in Microsoft Azure. Ultimately, this will help the bank deliver a faster time-to-market on products and services, while ensuring its IT infrastructure is optimised. By moving workloads to the cloud, Standard Bank will be able to access a range of features that it can deploy instantly and scale according to demand. This will result in cost reductions, improved system performance, and access to innovation.
“This will empower the bank to create new business models and deliver more personalised outcomes in today’s dynamic business environment. By providing Standard Bank with consistent engagement and delivery models, SAP and Microsoft bring both industry-specific best practices and deep local insight to deliver a compelling value proposition for their clients,” says Smith.
“Through Project Embrace, we are now able to better identify our business pain points and effectively address them through technologies that deliver a demonstratable return on investment. Having the ability to more accurately predict where customer challenges and dissatisfaction will occur enables a more flexible enterprise environment. We can help our customers transform their businesses and their lives in a secure way. This is much more than SAP and Microsoft supplying us with products. This is about fundamentally enhancing our digital journey for the future,” concludes Nkwanyana of Standard Bank SA.
In addition to the work done with Standard Bank, the Microsoft and SAP initiative is assisting customers around the world, and in a variety of industries, accelerate their journey to becoming digital, intelligent enterprises.
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MultiChoice Group is rethinking its business strategies in a rapidly changing industry. The company is using Microsoft technologies in its digital transformation journey to adapt and deliver content. Using technologies such as artificial intelligence(AI), mixed reality(MR), big data analytics and cognitive services to become agile and innovative.
In partnership with Microsoft South Africa, the company has been streamlining its business to change audience experiences. From migrating tape libraries to the Azure cloud to optimizing operations. One such instance is streaming the 2018 FIFA world cup in 4K to its subscribers using the Azure platform. Another is, being able to dub and subtitle content for different markets. Something that Brad Eliot, Group Chief Information Officer at MultiChoice says will be impossible and inefficient.
Multichoice will launch automated highlights packages for its sports channels using Microsoft Azure. Producing near real-time highlights for in live broadcast and social media.
“We produce a lot of our own local content and there’s a drive to see if we can use speech recognition to dub and subtitle that content. With the volume of media assets, we have literally thousands and thousands of hours of content. So doing this in a non-automated fashion would just be impossible and inefficient.”
Multichoice is currently using Microsoft solutions like Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and security services. With Microsoft Azure acting as a test and production platform for the company. Alkis Flemetakis, Account Director – Enterprise Commercial at Microsoft Corporation shares Azure is a key platform on their journey to the cloud.
“They are continuously assessing the environment and over the last four years, have created prototypes and MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) on the Microsoft cloud platform. Currently, MultiChoice are looking at migrating significant IT workloads to Azure, and using AI and machine learning to develop innovative solutions for their customers.”
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Microsoft South Africa has responded to the Afrika Tikkun Mfuleni center’s need for a greater student-centric IT facility. By outfitting the Zolile Malindi Centre of Excellence in Cape Town with a new computer lab. The new computer lab is larger, has modern computers and will be able to sit sixty students per class.
“Until recently we had two computer labs that could only accommodate 44 learners at a time. This wasn’t sufficient for all the learners the centre caters to daily. Often we had learners pairing up at desks taking turns throughout lessons. In addition, the computers were outdated and the hard drives had started to fail.” Says Lizo Madinga, General Manager of the center, Sharing on the state of the center.
Microsoft’s contribution to the Afrika Tikkun computer Lab is a result of our intentions to accelerate the pace of inclusive digital transformation. Notes Anthony Putorek, Senior Lead Workforce Development Program Manager at Microsoft.
“We are living in a world that is underpinned by tech intensity. Whereby companies, communities and countries are leveraging digital tools and platforms to build solutions and services to better service the needs of the citizens and customer. But they can only do this if they have a skilled workforce to do so. As such, fostering in the development of computer skills in education remains an important aspect of what we believe in.”
Lizo Madinga expresses gratitude to Microsoft South Africa for the amazing gift of upgrading the computer lab. She added, “the centre is now able to accommodate 60 learners per class in a much larger and visually appealing space. Giving meaning to the principle of leaving no-one behind.”
Today we are at or Mfuleni center in Cape Town about to launch the opening of our new computer labs that where so generously donated by Microsoft. Thank you for all that you have done in making the lives of our young people better and in assisting them to develop their skills. pic.twitter.com/5DaVi1oPjL
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Microsoft’s open source team hosted the first open cloud summit in Johannesburg, South Africa. The summit powered by Microsoft Azure, showcased some of the most innovative open source technologies in the Azure cloud. Microsoft South Africa, Azure Business Group Lead, Johannes Kanis revealed key momentum and engagements of customers since opening of the Microsoft Africa Datacenter.
Joe noted that since the arrival of the datacenters Microsoft has seen thousands of customers using the service. “We are experiencing double digit growth month on month” he continued. “We are continuing to bring in more advanced services. Particularly at this event we talked about Openshift on Azure, which in the coming weekswill be live in the South African datacenters as well“.
He expressed excitement at seeing customers maturing their products in terms of cloud usage in the Microsoft Africa Datacenter. Using services like serverless and containers.
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Red Hat’s OpenShift will soon be live in Microsoft’s Azure datacenters located in the Africa and Middle East region. Azure customers will be able to use the container platform as a cloud service to deliver enterprise-grade hybrid cloud solutions.
Riedwaan Bassadien, Microsoft Senior Cloud Data and AI Specialist made the announcement. Speaking to developers at the Open Cloud Summit held in Johannesburg and hosted by Microsoft and Linux. He noted Openshift on Azure will be live in the South Africa datacenter.
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