Intervate, a T-Systems company which specialises in digital transformation solutions, has been relaunched with a new brand identity and solution offering as part of a renewed innovation focus.

The latest development stems from a recent partnership between Intervate's parent company, T-systems, and Microsoft, to strengthen both organisations' offerings to the market.

Intervate says, "The new brand aims to reaffirm Intervate's philosophy of 'anything's possible' while aligning the brand more closely with that of parent company, T-Systems South Africa."

The company added that it will retain its autonomy as a separate business within T-Systems.

Craig Mitchelmore, Head of Intervate (North) says, "Becoming a part of the global T-Systems organisation has created opportunities for us to expand our horizons, tap into new growth opportunities and develop new competencies and solution offerings that are assisting organisations to engage their digital transformation strategies. Our new brand stands to reaffirm our commitment to innovation while underscoring our cohesive ties with T-Systems."

T-Systems says an example of its renewed innovation focus is its recently launched Design Thinking Labs solution which is described as "a consulting service that marries creative technology concepts together with design thinking principles, and applies them to solve business problems."

T-Systems recently announced a partnership with Microsoft to assist enterprise customers across Sub-Saharan Africa to take full advantage of Microsoft's Azure Cloud computing service.

This followed Microsoft's recently announced plans to deploy local Azure datacentres in Johannesburg and Cape Town. In the agreement, T-Systems will provide managed services on top of Microsoft's hosting services from the two data centres.

Mitchelmore adds that, "The combined relationships that both Intervate and T-Systems have with Microsoft will enable us to leverage Azure as our hyperscale public cloud platform of choice. This will strengthen and extend our Microsoft offering while T-Systems' customers can tap into Intervate's user-centric, innovation-driven portfolio of offerings. The synergies are extensive and create a perfect triangulation."

Mpumi Nhlapo, Head of Marketing and Communications at T-Systems South Africa, says the market is changing rapidly, "we need to assist our customers to engage the digital era effectively."

"We have been working towards aligning the T-Systems and Intervate teams more closely to bridge our core value propositions and build synergies between the two organisations, delivering greater value to our customers."

According to Gert Schoonbee, Managing Director at T-Systems South Africa, the company's Microsoft partnership will affect plans it announced in July to launch an OpenStack Public Cloud platform, along with Huawei, in the region called Open Telekom Cloud (OTC).

T-Systems and Huawei were planning to start taking customers onto OTC in Q4 2017.

While speaking to ITWeb Africa at the company's recent InTouch Technology 2017 event, Schoonbee said the partnership with Microsoft Azure will initially only benefit South Africa, although plans are in place to achieve a continent-wide reach.

"In Africa Azure has only announced its offering for South Africa, so we will start with that as our initial focus.

"We have customers on our private cloud in other parts of Africa hosted currently in our data centres in South Africa, but as the relationship matures we will explore with Microsoft to see how we can roll it out because other countries in West or East Africa may have similar desires to the ones that we have from a data sovereignty perspective to say they expect us to host our public cloud within their borders."