iOCO Cloud, a division of iOCO, the ICT services arm of the EOH Group, is leveraging its VMware Cloud Provider Partner (VCPP) status to enable customers to centralise the deployment of both multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments from its seven global datacentres.

These services are hosted in interconnectivity partner Teraco Data Environments’ Africa Cloud Exchange in Africa.

According to iOCO, with the entry of the hyperscaler cloud providers in South Africa, customers want service providers that offer a seamless exchange between their private clouds and public cloud providers.

A VCPP partner, iOCO, uses VMware's cloud solutions as the infrastructure fabric on which it hosts its cloud services while providing them subscription-based VMware licensing to build their cloud. A large part of its success is attributed to iOCO’s partnership with Teraco Data Environments, currently the local onramp for many hyperscalers interoperability between private and public clouds.

Paul Spagnoletti, business unit executive for Cloud & Security SA, iOCO.

“We started this journey a decade ago, early in local cloud terms, so you run the risk of just being another infrastructure hosting partner,” said Paul Spagnoletti, Business Unit Executive: Cloud and Security South Africa. “Our goal has always been to develop a multi-cloud, multi-tenant environment we manage for clients or offer clients self-service capabilities. Our partnerships with VMware and Teraco have been critical to the development of our any-cloud-as-a-service solution, which facilitates a customer’s move away from CAPEX models towards an OPEX-based IT solution.”

The companies assert that a 100% hosted cloud offering providing cloud-as-a-service, iOCO forms the critical link between a client's private cloud and a public cloud.

Its service offerings extend to delivering clients with managed cloud services, enablement, and roadmaps. With Teraco as its interconnectivity partner, iOCO also draws from the security and performance of the interconnectivity provided by the Africa Data Exchange, and the proximity of the onramps to one or multiple clouds.

Di Buijs, Strategic Partnerships, Teraco Data Environments, “The way we articulate our role and the benefits we provide is that we partner with cloud providers like iOCO to offer a connectivity ecosystem via all the networks that land at Teraco. Plus, an onramp to every hyperscaler, be it AWS, Microsoft or Oracle. This opens opportunities for end-users to optimise their journey to digital transformation, an area our VMware Cloud Provider Partners, like iOCO, are good at capitalising on.”

According to Spagnoletti, iOCO’s platform has an uptime of 99.99999%. It's not gone down in ten years, even when it expanded its services to include the VCPP offerings and increased its number of customers.

He says the environment's ability to auto-scale and auto-provision as customers are added is testament to the flexibility and agility afforded from the VMware vCloud Verified stack.

“VMware is a major part of our hosted cloud platform; they are front and centre of it and a massive part of our technical landscape. Their ongoing investment into their offerings and solutions help us enhance and continually adapt our services to our customers, frequently without a customer even realising their cloud is driven by VMware," said Spagnoletti.

Sumeeth Singh, Head of Cloud Provider Business Sub-Saharan Africa, VMware, said: “Through the value it delivers and its ability to offer clients a single pane of glass into multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, iOCO demonstrates the importance of partnerships in a highly competitive cloud market. Its any-cloud-as-a-service solutions, and its knowledge of marrying multiple cloud offerings into a single service place it in an enviable position in the local market. From a VMware perspective, we are excited to be a part of a multi-cloud platform for all applications offering simplicity of choice for our partners and customers. "