T-Systems South Africa and Huawei have signed an agreement during the Eco-Connect Summit in Johannesburg that will see the two companies launch Open Telekom Cloud (OTC) to local shores in the fourth quarter of 2017.

The local iteration of OTC comes after a year of negotiations between the two companies and nearly two years after OTC was first launched globally by Huawei's international office and the parent company of T-Systems' Deutsche Telekom.

Gert Schoonbee, CEO of T-Systems South Africa says the partnership with Huawei marks an important milestone for T-Systems - twenty years after the ICT company began outsourcing services to enterprises in the country.

"During our journey we have evolved and we see how the digital transformation journey has evolved globally as well. In the past ten years we've brought different cloud solutions to our customers in South Africa and with OTC we saw that there is an opportunity from a South African perspective to provide a hyperscale solution that is based here. We know the world is changing quickly in this area and therefore we are quite determined not to do our own thing and that is why we looked to Deutsche Telekom in Germany and Huawei China and then decided to negotiate with Huawei locally. We want to make sure that we can piggyback on their partnership and be in the continuous slipstream of roadmaps for OTC development in China and Germany. We want to get the benefit from that. OTC is openstack and it is a solution that provides platform as a service and also software as a service."

Schoonbee adds that while the OTC will be hosted in Johannesburg, there are plans in place to bring the global cloud innovation to more countries in Africa.

T-Systems South Africa has two offices South Africa and 20 representative offices in locations throughout Southern Africa.

"It is part of our plan to benefit the rest of Africa through OTC. Phase one has been putting everything in place in South Africa and we plan on moving it into the rest of Africa and finding more partners especially in the eastern and western regions [of the continent]."

Schoonbee says OTC will compete with players based in the US who are limited in the number of beneficiaries they can bring into South Africa.

"Given that we are deploying OTC locally in South Africa, we will be retaining the revenue in the country, moreover, it enables us to fully comply with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI). In all, we are ecstatic about this as it brings simplicity, security and affordability to our customers. We can also keep some of the jobs in the country. Some of these big public clouds mean that some money and jobs are leaving the country and by making sure that we keep this cloud in South Africa, we make it possible to use the OTC to build economic more capabilities."

The OTC strategic partner ecosystem includes SAP, Microsoft, Huawei and Oracle.

Lawrence Kandaswami, Managing Director of SAP SA, attended the signing ceremony and lauded the introduction of the public cloud offering in Africa.

"Making sure that data stays in the country is quite key. I think this is an important step from a software applications perspective. Huawei and T-Systems have been strategic partners of SAP for many years. We have grown as a business and it is great that we can have software as a service offered on a public cloud like OTC. It means that economies of scale take over and that we will make digital transformation much more affordable. Having this data centre here means that healthcare from an ICT perspective in the form of patient management can be much cheaper,"

"From another perspective we can look at billing for smaller municipalities. It opens up the doors of digital transformation in South Africa and brings more opportunities. It will also take IoT to the next level, SAP being an application provider means that this story is not simply about bringing devices and innovations from outside Africa here but also about exporting them," says Kandaswami.

Daniel Liu, Channel Director of Huawei Enterprise Business Group for Southern Africa emphasised the value of a localised public cloud solution.

"Huawei has enjoyed a successful partnership with leading global ICT provider, T-Systems, working together on the OTC offering in European and Asian markets. T-Systems South Africa has a strong focus on delivering quality ICT to South Africa and African markets and together we aim to focus on accelerating digital transformation within these borders."