Automation combined with cloud services the next step in Africa
“The three main challenges facing CIO’s and IT managers when delivering infrastructure to the organisation are time to market, the cost to do so and the risk involved,” says Paul Cant, Area Vice President for Iberia, Africa and the Middle East at BMC Software. “With the increased adoption of cloud services the time to market challenge can be solved, this is a big focus area for African business to automate end to end IT processes in order to reduce costs and re-assign valuable resources all within a secure software platform.”
Cant says that Africa is a key growth market for the company with a similar maturity level as Spain in some areas, “Given that I have only recently moved into this role after spending just over two years in Iberia, I have taken the past three months to align myself with the challenges and requirements of our South African and Africa customers. This has informed our strategy for this region moving into 2013.”
Cant says that currently organisations are using some departmental software tools to automate point solutions. A good example of this would be the server build teams or administration teams where there are silos of people operating different tools to accomplish one business process of provisioning full stack infrastructure adding unnecessary delay risk and cost. This is further compounded by the heterogeneous nature of the infrastructure that is being managed and ultimately means that there are many resources needed to manage the different tasks in the data centre.
“At BMC we take automation a level higher to enterprise level management covering all the tasks required by the IT support teams across physical, virtual and cloud all within one purpose built automation platform with one user interface. This then reduces cost and frees up valuable 2nd and 3rd level resources allowing these resources to then focus on service improvement work, deliver more projects and provide a better service to the business and end users.”
“The feedback we’ve had from our customers in South Africa is that cloud services, be it Software-as-a-service (SaaS), or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is key to their businesses and with the shift into cloud, they aren’t just wanting product support anymore, but rather a premier service which includes skills on-site for mission critical applications. Alongside this they are looking for automation of additional infrastructure requirements such as databases, network devices, application provisioning and an expanded role for BMC in their projects, including architecture,” says Cant.
“Africa is an exciting region for us,” says Cant. “We’re eager to deliver more visibility on the ground through partners and key service resources from BMC and it’s even more important to outline the key value proposition for our customers in terms of the two main focus areas, cloud and automation.”
BMC Software currently boasts over 120 customers in Africa, the majority of which have been with the company for over 5 years due to its market leading ITSM solution, Remedy. Cant says that the company will also have BMC Software staff working with key partners on the continent including Gijima, Blue Turtle, Accenture, Quintica and metaWEAVE for the purpose of mentoring and up-skilling partner employees’ technical skills in the area of cloud and automation. The aim is to strengthen the overall eco-system in order to benefit joint customers and continue to improve the level of service and added value to the whole African market.
