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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Google announces fund to support online safety in Africa.
Marking World Safer Internet Day Google though its philanthropy arm is launching a one million USD pan-African fund. To help in promoting online safety and keeping children safe online. To achieve this, google will empower social enterprises and non profits with project ideas focused on digital literacy and online safety.
Google also launched a children online literacy program, Be Internet Awesome initiative in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. It will work with partners to teach kids how to be safe, confident explorers of the online world.
The company announced this in a statement on its Africa social media page.
“Today we are launching Be Internet Awesome in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa. We will be working with our partners across the region to teach kids how to be safe, confident explorers of the online world. To help in promoting online safety, @Googleorg will be launching a $1M fund. Will be open to nonprofits to work on project that is focused on keeping children safe online.“
Google notes the core of its Be Internet Awesome initiative is working as a unit with parents, children and educators. On the ground rules that keep them safe online.
“Be Internet Awesome” is designed to help children practice smart tactics for analyzing and evaluating information, sharing media with caution, protecting and securing private data, and handling cyberbullying, for example.
Google is currently receiving an expression of interest from organizations who will like to access in the grant.
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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 Middle East and Africa Cloud Society is organizing a certification contest. That will see three winners receive a return air ticket to Cape Town, South Africa. The winners will attend a special Microsoft Media Event as well as DevConf 2020 software developer conference. Another ten winners will be selected for various prices including lunch with a Microsoft subject matter expert.
Microsoft says the contest is “to train IT professionals, developers and students in the Middle East & Africa on Cloud technology, while also rewarding them”. Everyone including Microsoft Partners are eligible to participate in the cloud society certification contest. Oh you must be eighteen years and above.
The skill-based contest is however opened to only people from the following countries. South Africa, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kenya, Nigeria, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Lebanon and Mauritius. Let’s find out how to participate if you are eligible.
This is how the contest reads out;
Play an instrumental role in strengthening the security posture of your organization with professional cloud computing courses. Begin your journey today by taking our free, specialized courses on Security, powered by Azure on Microsoft Cloud Society and get incredible rewards along the way. What are you waiting for?
Steps to winning a trip to South Africa and DevConf 2020
1. Register to become a member of the Microsoft Cloud Society. If you aren’t already a member. Registration is free. If you are a member sign in with your account details. Kindly note that you’ll need to link your LinkedIn profile to your registered account.
2. Complete any 2 courses from the Security(Microsoft 365 Security or Azure Security) or 1 course from the Modern Workplace learning paths.
3. Get a free Course Completion badge/trophy from Microsoft when you complete the course.
4. Create a public post by sharing your Course Completion badge on LinkedIn or Facebook using the hashtag #iamacloudhero.
5. The top 10 posts with the highest total number of likes and shares on March 1st 2020 will win one of the below prize.
Receive a one year LinkedIn Premium subscription
Be featured on the Microsoft Cloud Society Homepage
Have lunch with a Microsoft technical expert
6. Now to win the an all-expenses-paid trip to South Africa and attend DevConf 2020 and the special Microsoft Media event, you’ll need to take one more major step. That is get Microsoft certified for the course you took. Take a paidexaminationrelated to your course. Note that Microsoft cloud society members recieve a discount on the exams fee.
7. Share your Course Completion badge/trophy and paid Completion Certificate on LinkedIn and Facebook using the hashtag #iamacloudhero.
8. The top three participants with the highest total number of post likes and shares will get a chance to go to Devconf, Cape Town in March 2020.
Got any other questions, thoughts or suggestions about the contest? Share them with us in the comments. Don’t forget to share this with anyone who will like or benefit from this. Thank you.
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Microsoft’s open-source team is organizing an Open Cloud Summit in Johannesburg. Powered by Microsoft Azure, the summit will showcase some of the most innovative open source technologies in the cloud.
The 1-day event will include a deep dive into the most trending and innovative open platforms in the cloud. There will be breakout sessions and workshops led by experts and practitioners in the open-source field.
The Summit will take place on 28 November 2019 at the Fox Junction event center, Johannesburg. Find the event announcement below. Kindly visit the event page to register and participate.
This year, we are excited to host Open Cloud Summit in Johannesburg for the first time. Powered globally by Microsoft Azure with guest speakers from leading projects such as GitHub, SUSE, Kubernetes, Spark, OpenShift, PostgreSQL and RedisLabs.
You can also check out the Middle East and Africa virtual event held earlier this year on demand. Hear Adir Ron, Open Source Lead, Middle East & Africa, Microsoft share on the company’s open-source strategy.
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