Microsoft is committing to training ten thousand software developers in South Africa by the end of 2022. By giving them an opportunity to learn new and modern skills as well as access to the latest technologies. This is in an effort to help in building the local software developer community in the country.
Microsoft will through skilling programs and initiatives upskill developers so that they can add value within informal developer communities as well as across commercial and corporate environments.
“At Microsoft, we understand the power of community says Lillian Barnard, General Manager at Microsoft South Africa. “And appreciate the value these shared spaces can bring to employees, businesses, and, ultimately, the world“, she adds.
Lillian notes that when organizations like Microsoft work together with developer communities to overcome skills gaps the result is creativity and more innovation. Developers with access to the latest technologies and skills result in an acceleration of the digital transformation of businesses.
“When we build thriving developer communities, …, we also create innovations that have a societal impact and that have the potential to change lives.”
Lillian Barnard, Microsoft South Africa MD
Microsoft didn’t throw light on how or who it will partner with to execute this project. However, in previous campaigns, it has worked with developer communities such as the Andela Learning Community, Geekulcha, and other groups.
Microsoft has selected The Awareness Company as the winner of its AgriChallenge competition. The Awareness Company will receive investments from Microsoft to configure, develop, educate, market and contextualise three high-impact agritech products within the next year to empower smallholder farmers in South Africa.
We want to help unlock the potential of one of South Africa’s core industries and its smallholder farmers by tapping into the capabilities of agritech. By investing in local businesses and technologies that are truly disruptive says Lillian Barnard, CEO of Microsoft South Africa.
“Technology – specifically agritech – has the ability to empower our country’s smallholder farmers. By enabling them to become more productive, efficient, competitive, commercially viable and sustainable.”
Lillian Barnard, CEO of Microsoft South Africa.
Microsoft notes the solutions will enable smallholder farmers to improve efficiencies in their farming operations through the use of operational insights. Allowing them to reduce the cost of production, increase yields, strengthen linkages through the value chain and improve farm security.
Priaash Ramadeen, CEO of The Awareness Company says Microsoft’s support and investment is a jump-start. Noting smallholder farmers play a critical role in driving food security.
“The country’s two to four million smallholder farmers play a critical role in driving food security and economic participation. But they face specific and deep-rooted challenges, and the sector is typically underserved in terms of high-tech solutions.
That’s why Microsoft’s support and investment in helping us as a local, homegrown business to grow and develop solutions that focus on solving real-world problems is so meaningful. The programme is a jump-start that has enabled us to create and update products that synchronise with the work we have already done in the agricultural space to promote sustainable agriculture and food security through intelligent data.”
Priaash Ramadeen, Co-Founder and CEO of The Awareness Company.
The solutions developed by The Awareness Company includes HYDRA FarmSecurity, HYDRA FarmAwareness and HYDRA AgriInsights. All of these solutions are driven by data, and the insights and intelligence tell a story about the farm. Click to find out more about the solutions.
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The Surface Laptop 4 is now available in South Africa as Microsoft officially launches the device. The least configuration for the Surface Laptop 4, AMD Ryzen 5 4680U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, will start selling at R945 per month at Vodacom and R18,999 at Everyshop and Incredible Connection. With the highest configuration, Intel Core i7-1185G7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, selling at R32,999. Unfortunately, the is no mention of the 32GB RAM and 1TB models.
“We are excited to add Surface Laptop 4 to our growing Surface range locally, says Colin Erasmus, Modern Workplace and Security Business Group Lead at Microsoft South Africa. It powers modern multitasking demands, and combines a vibrant touchscreen display, large trackpad with gesture support and an industry-leading typing experience,” he adds.
The 2021 version of the Surface Laptop looks very similar to the Surface Laptop 3 in design. But has a massive internal upgrade. It comes with two processor types; an 11th generation Intel processor and a custom AMD Ryzen Surface edition processor. It is also designed in 13″ and 15′ models.
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Microsoft is announcing the addition of Availability Zones to the South Africa North cloud region. Expanding the region to have three unique physically separated locations within the region. To bring higher availability and asynchronous replication of applications and data for disaster recovery protection.
Microsoft says the Availability Zones give users additional options for high availability for their most demanding applications and services. As well as confidence and protection from potential hardware and software failures. By providing three or more unique physical locations within an Azure region.
These zones located in Johannesburg will each have their own power, cooling and high-speed low latency connections. Let’s say you are deploying a web tier consisting of 3 virtual machines, you can place one in each zone. So that if zone A fails your customers will still be able to access the other virtual machines in the other availability zones in the same Azure region. This is really ideal where data residency laws and regulatory requirements are important.
South Africa North is the only Azure cloud region in the Middle East and Africa to get availability zones presence. Microsoft will bring availability zones to the UAE North region and establish a new datacenter region in Israel this year.
Microsoft launched two cloud regions in Africa, South Africa North and West located in Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively. And two in the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Interestingly, when you check the Azure global infrastructure map it appears Microsoft is hiding certain regions. Regions it classifies as reserved access regions and this includes South Africa West and Abu Dhabi. Although these regions are available to customers, they will require you to go through a request process in order to gain access. The process to request access is straightforward and you can initiate it directly within the Azure portal.
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Four hundred thousand people in South Africa have participated in the Microsoft Global Skills initiative. A Digital skills initiative that seeks to help participants gain in-demand skills to become employable. This shows an increase from the three hundred thousand shared in March this year.
Lillian Barnard, Managing Director, Microsoft South Africa details this at the launch event of the Nedbank DigiSkills online platform. Another strategic partnership with a private sector organization to extend the reach of digital skills to more South Africans.
Extending access to these learning paths, skills and tools come at a critical time for South Africa, says Lillian Barnard. Noting a declining economy and unemployment remain a mounting and widespread challenge in the country.
Even though the skills program has exceeded its initial goal of reaching 25 million learners, only over a million of those come from Africa. With South Africa having the most participants. Microsoft mentioned partnering with other organizations and governments as one of the many ways to change this. And offering additional funding and services where necessary.
These partnerships have been fundamental to scale programmes that help more people gain the critical future skills needed in the digital economy. We are committed to collaborating with partners such as Nedbank and Afrika Tikkun to provide the training, tools and platforms to boost employability and economic growth.
Lillian Barnard
Lillian believes digital skills are the most effective way to drive economic recovery in South Africa. Noting it is a priority for Microsoft to create opportunities that will enable and empower unemployed South Africans. Microsoft has provided $150000 in grants to the youth development NPO to extend the reach of the Microsoft Skills Initiative programme in South Africa.
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