Last week, Global Micro Solutions and Microsoft partnered to boost South Africa’s cloud reseller market by providing practical advice on how to become a cloud provider and the benefits of using a local cloud partner.
The companies said opportunity exists for resellers to add cloud services to their offering and how and why they need to partner with a local provider.
Nick Keene, Cloud Sales Manager at Microsoft SA said,“The Hosting Service Provider Market is part of the Microsoft Cloud Strategy and as such Microsoft will continue to invest and support our HSP partners. Our hosting partners have many years of cloud experience as they have been providing cloud services since 2000. Recently Microsoft announced further integration between the hosting providers and the Microsoft public cloud that will allow our customers to obtain Public and Hosted Cloud from a one stop shop. Global Micro Solutions has been a long standing strategic hosting partner for Microsoft.”
Microsoft, through its Azure platform provides a cloud space for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacentres, like the one with Global Micro. The firm has long been promoting cloud solutions as a way to cut costs, save hardware space and bandwidth and use software as and when it is needed.
“People see one of the benefits of the cloud as being the opportunity to buy into a global framework anywhere in the world, from anywhere in the world, but this isn’t strictly a benefit,” says JJ Milner, founder and chief cloud architect at Global Micro. “In truth, you want your data in the same country as you, bound by the same laws as you, who will support you in your own language in a familiar accent. This is why you should have a local cloud partner.”
Partnerships with local partners ensure;
- Data sovereignty: Simply put, your data is in the same country as you and governed by the same laws as you and your business, which are understood by any local legal advisors and technology consultants you may engage.
- Local contacts: When and if something goes wrong, you can be confident that there is a viable, real, local contact that you can get in touch with who can, if necessary, come and see you to resolve the issue.
- Efficient functionality: You will be able to easily and quickly control the uploading or downloading of your data whenever it is needed.
The Global Micro reseller programme has been created to allow consultants, web hosting companies or service providers to leverage the company’s enterprise infrastructure and expertise, and offer value-added services that are locally relevant and robust to their customers. Global Micro provides hosting infrastructure, the administrative control panel, and the 24/7 technical support and that all exist within South Africa’s borders, ensuring all the benefits of local cloud provisioning.
“We work with two independent datacentres and two independent ISPs. We provide our channel partners with the ability to get to market faster with automated management platforms.”
According to Milner, Global Micro offers Hybrid transitioning services, Messaging and collaboration, backup and data recovery, McAfee, Flowgear Ground-to-cloud integration, a defined roadmap of services that are integrated into the cloud, which partners can choose when to bring to market, the opportunity to earn up to 30% reselling white label cloud services, sales collateral – brochures, cheat sheets and FAQs, technical training so that they can hit the ground running and the ability to leverage the Global Micro sales and marketing team.
