The South Africa-based connectivity, digital and financial services company, Vodacom has announced the launch of Africa’s first Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outposts Innovation Lab in collaboration with AWS and Intel. According to a statement from Vodacom, the laboratory will focus on accelerating technology innovations across different industries, delivering faster scalability, and creating the opportunity to use infrastructure and technologies to solve business challenges.
The laboratory is expected to help enterprise and public sector customers of Vodacom Business to accelerate their digital transformation journey by building, managing, and scaling their local applications using AWS services and tools.
The long-term impact of the laboratory is that customers will, through the use of new technologies, be able to save time and money in how they run their businesses, as well as create enhanced experiences for their own customers. Vodacom says its customers can now reach out to Vodacom to validate their hybrid use cases and test their workloads on AWS Outposts before deploying them in production.
The laboratory, located in Johannesburg, will serve as a Proof of Concept (POC) setup for customers to test their applications and environment for performance on AWS Outposts. Intel-powered AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that is designed to provide AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to virtually any on-premises or edge location. It enables the running of applications that have low latency, data residency, and local data processing needs on-premises while reducing the time, resources, and operational risk required to procure, manage, and upgrade on-premises infrastructure.
Intel is working with AWS to promote the laboratory’s offering and Vodacom leverages its position as an APN member to test and deliver the migration to AWS Outposts.
“This offering represents a great opportunity to meet our customers’ demands for AWS hybrid cloud on and off-premises—often a barrier to cloud adoption in more regulated industries where privacy and control of sensitive data and information are important considerations,” says Vodacom Business Managing Executive for Cloud, Hosting & Security, Kabelo Makwane.
“While customers are increasingly looking to leverage cloud technologies for faster innovation, some workloads need to remain on-premises where data residency is paramount or where every millisecond counts,” said Vinod Krishnan, Partner Development Lead for Europe Emerging Markets at AWS.