Tarsus On Demand, the cloud enablement company within the Tarsus Technology Group and Microsoft cloud solution provider, intends to expand its offering from South Africa to the rest of the continent in the next six-to-eight months.

The company released a statement which clarified its intention to first expand into the rest of the SADC region, followed by launches in East and West Africa.

Tarsus On Demand has not confirmed exactly which countries it plans to target and more information is expected in early 2020.

According to Tarsus on Demand, it works closely with IT channel partners in South Africa that are repositioning their businesses to take advantage of the opportunities in the cloud.

Vinay Hiralall, general manager: demand generation at Tarsus On Demand said: "Our recent win of the Microsoft Top Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) – Indirect Award, supports our belief that we have proven our business model in South Africa, where many partners are working with us to enable their cloud strategies. With rising demand for cloud services throughout the rest of the continent, we are an early mover and will be positioned as a key player."

Hiralall added that the growing penetration of high-speed mobile networks and fibre in major African cities means that the bandwidth for cloud applications is increasingly available.

"Paired with a need for African organisations to automate processes and modernise legacy IT infrastructure, this is expected to trigger a boom in demand for public, private and hybrid cloud services in the years to come," he said.

The company referred to research by Xalam Analytics which estimates the Africa cloud market has grown at a rate of 30% a year for the past three years.

But this growth is coming off a low base, meaning that there is still enormous potential in the market, said Hiralall. "Africa has lagged the rest of the world in rolling out IT infrastructure. The cloud offers African enterprises and government organisations the opportunity to leapfrog legacy technologies and put in place the latest solutions. The current investments service providers are making in building data centres and developing cloud platforms across the continent is a signal of their confidence in the market."

With global cloud providers such as Microsoft building their own data centre infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, the cloud business model is becoming increasingly attractive for African companies, he adds. "Now that there are Microsoft Azure data centres located in South Africa, companies enjoy faster response times than they did when they had to use infrastructure in Europe or the US," Hiralall adds.

According to Hiralall, Tarsus On Demand will support African IT partners in their journey to the cloud with a range of cloud-enablement services from strategy and architecture to migration and day-to-day management.

Partners can leverage Tarsus On Demand's relationships with vendors like Microsoft to offer cloud services and turn to it for technical support, billing and provisioning tools, and more.

"There is an excellent revenue opportunity for the African channel in the cloud, but transitioning one's skills, business model and infrastructure to the new way of doing business can be challenging and time-consuming," Hiralall says. "We're there to support partners throughout their learning curve from a product and technology perspective."

Cloud buzz

Microsoft unveiled Azure datacentres in Johannesburg and Cape Town in March 2019.

In early October 2019 Corey Sanders, corporate vice president for Microsoft solutions said he senses a buzz around cloud in Africa and the company cited IDC research which predicts cloud computing could potentially generate more than 14 million jobs across the globe in the next three years.