NEC XON has used vScaler from Boston IT Solutions South Africa to create a rapidly scalable, flexible and agile digital transformation, as-a-service business platform.

The platform, which gathers real-time data for processing by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms, provides for many use cases.

“The outcome of optimised and predictable operations and risk-based insights with event dashboards are to improve business continuity, returns on capital, customer experiences, processes, efficiencies, and risk management,” says Gregg Sanders, Digital Business lead at NEC XON. “Providing the customer facing as- a-service platform from our own data centre using vScaler technology from Boston IT Solutions, rather than public cloud infrastructures, provides numerous benefits. At scale it’s a more cost-effective architecture, the benefits of which amplify our competitive edge. We are also able to rapidly scale and adapt the platform to our own and clients’ requirements, which provides a customer experience advantage that cannot be replicated via public cloud infrastructures.”

The potential applications support digital transformation strategies, businesses seeking to improve service levels, access to information, online operations and transactions, cost reductions, resource optimisation, asset life extension, improved monitoring for security and availability by leveraging AI and ML, and improved customer engagement.

NEC XON’s platform is currently piloting financial aid and disbursement management for prominent global aid agencies that also operate in sub-Sahara Africa. The system gives smallholder farmers in areas where infrastructure is limited to a smart card, with which they acquire their farming supplies. It uses the same technology as tapping a smartphone at a retail checkout, which are low-energy consumption wireless capabilities now commonly available in many parts of Africa.

“NEC XON’s application of vScaler technology crystallises the disruptive advantages for innovative, on-prem cloud solutions enabled by the ability to provision HPC (high performance computing), on-demand clusters, big data analytics, accelerated GPU (graphics processing unit) compute, and tiered and accelerated storage platforms,” says Chris Coetzee, Business Director of Boston IT Solutions South Africa.

Sanders adds: “A major advantage we are already realising after moving our workloads onto vScaler is a consolidated infrastructure that offers us more flexibility than ever before. We can scale workloads instantly, and even burst workloads into public cloud services for POC (proof of concept) work, for example, which means our environment is leaner and more efficient.”

NEC XON chose vScaler for its openness that also provides the benefits associated with traditional vendor support structures.

Conrad van Niekerk, head of Business Platforms at NEC XON, says: “vScaler enables multitenancy for inter-company charge-back that is a crucial element for proving business unit ROI for many customers. The pay-as-you-use financial model helps customers manage IT budgets and the solution is easy to deploy and manage without burdening skilled resources.”