Multinational ICT company Huawei says its new full-stack private cloud solution, FusionCloud 6.3, has been designed to help businesses that have migrated to the cloud leverage built-in cloud service capabilities derived from software-hardware synergy.

The solution, available in Africa from 30 July, was launched to global markets at CEBIT 2018 hosted recently in Germany.

Muhammed Seedat, IT Director at Huawei Technologies in Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA) said: "For enterprises, cloud migration is not the ultimate goal. Instead, they focus on how cloud computing adapts to their business and customer environment. This newly released solution provides high-performance cloud service capabilities using tech stacks and innovation enabled by software-hardware synergy. It can meet cloud-based requirements of enterprise applications and solve real-world problems."

Seedat specified the solution's converged 'one cloud, one lake, one platform' architecture and said this will help businesses meet their cloud-based requirements.

In this context, one cloud refers to a converged cloud infrastructure featuring unified delivery, management and service provisioning.

One lake is reference to the aggregation of data multiple parties with provision of full-lifecycle data processing capabilities. These include data collection, storage, computing, management, and utilisation to transform data resources into data assets.

"One Platform" is an application enablement platform that integrates basic data services, general-purpose middleware, and industry-specific middleware to enable customers and independent software vendor's to improve their service offering.

Seedat believes that cloud is a key engine for digital transformation and as more businesses across numerous industries transform, service cloudification will need to adapt.

The ability of businesses to not only migrate to the cloud, but follow this through by transforming operations and meet service demands is a growing trend in Africa.

Huawei believes service providers are now in a position to roll out the tools that businesses can- and should use to leverage this trend.

The company says FusionCloud 6.3 represents the kind of tech tools it is referring to.

This level of technology will ensure the business migrating to the cloud is able to secure ROI on the investment.

William Dong, Vice President of Marketing Solution Sales at Huawei Enterprise Business Group said: "The move to cloud computing is not the end goal for most enterprises. Instead, they are focused on how cloud can help them transform their businesses to respond to market and competitive demands."

Gilbert Saggia, Managing Director for East Africa at SAP Africa believes cloud providers in the African market have to evolve to support SMEs.

He says providers no longer sell standard solutions packages. "A strong partner ecosystem is invaluable in helping SMEs unlock the potential of their digital transformation. External partners can innovate and build upon the platform provided by larger solutions providers, combining new applications with standard solutions to create entirely new value-generators."

"We believe this is the best way to support Africa's growing SME sector. As we head to the crossover point - now predicted to be 2020 - at which IT expenditure for cloud services outstrips that of on-premise IT solutions, African SMEs should start engaging with vendors and partners who can fast-track their digital transformation and journey to the cloud, improving their competitiveness and providing some peace of mind that their business can withstand the forces of constant disruption."