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.
[jetpack_subscription_form show_only_email_and_button=”true” custom_background_button_color=”undefined” custom_text_button_color=”undefined” submit_button_text=”Hi, Kindly subscribe to get the latest from the world of tech and Microsoft across Africa and the Middle East. ” submit_button_classes=”undefined” show_subscribers_total=”true” ]
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.”
[jetpack_subscription_form show_only_email_and_button=”true” custom_background_button_color=”undefined” custom_text_button_color=”undefined” submit_button_text=”Get the latest news from the Microsoft and Tech ecosystem in Africa and the Middle East. Subscribe!” submit_button_classes=”undefined” show_subscribers_total=”true” ]
Microsoft will establish a new datacenter region in Israel in 2021. The Israel datacenter will start by offering customers Azure cloud services and followed later by Office 365 services. The new datacenter region will enable customers use Microsoft’s advanced technologies. Whiles adhering to data residency requirements to store data within Israel.
This will bring to six, the total number of Microsoft datacenters in the Middle East and Africa region. Increasing Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure to 56 cloud regions. Israel and Qatar cloud regions planned to go live in 2021.
Offering Microsoft Azure and Office 365 from a datacenter region in Israel forms a key part of our investment, shares Michel van der Bel, President, Microsoft Europe, Middle East and Africa.
When I speak to customers across EMEA, it is clear that the power of the cloud is essential for their competitiveness. We have made significant infrastructure investments in the region. As infrastructure is an essential building block for the tech intensity that public sector entities and businesses need to embrace.
Microsoft believes startups in the country will benefit greatly from the local datacenter in tangent with its startup program.
[jetpack_subscription_form show_only_email_and_button=”true” custom_background_button_color=”undefined” custom_text_button_color=”undefined” submit_button_text=”Subscribe to recieve the latest from the Microsoft ecosystem in Africa and the Middle East.” submit_button_classes=”undefined” show_subscribers_total=”true” ]
Global AI Bootcamp is here again. Interested in learning about artificial intelligence(AI) and Microsoft Azure? Then the Global AI Bootcamp presents you with that opportunity. Join others learners worldwide in the one day, free event at a local meetup near you.
The Global AI Bootcamp is a free one-day event. Organized by local communities all over the world that are passionate about Artificial Intelligence on the Microsoft stack. The next event takes place on the 14th of December 2019 on venues all over the world, supported by Microsoft.
There are Global AI Bootcamp meetups taking place all over Nigeria. Know of other Global AI Bootcamp meetups in Nigeria we haven’t included? Share them with us.
Don’t forget to join the communities for updates on future events.
[jetpack_subscription_form show_only_email_and_button=”true” custom_background_button_color=”undefined” custom_text_button_color=”undefined” submit_button_text=”Subscribe to recieve updates on the latest events, news, offers and opportunities from the Microsoft Africa and Middle East communities. ” submit_button_classes=”undefined” show_subscribers_total=”true” ]
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.
[jetpack_subscription_form show_only_email_and_button=”true” custom_background_button_color=”undefined” custom_text_button_color=”undefined” submit_button_text=”Subscribe to get the latest updates of news, events, opportunities, etc. from the Microsoft Middle East and Africa community. ” submit_button_classes=”undefined” show_subscribers_total=”true” ]
