Pedro Lopes, (left) Group Managing Director, Seidor Africa and Terrence Chowles (right) Project Director, Seidor Africa

According to group managing director, Pedro Lopes, SEIDOR’s solutions focus on enabling its customers to be better-performing entities, or allowing them to focus more closely on their core business. In essence, he says, SEIDOR takes care of the technology platform, and the additional elements and technologies that constitute the cloud; this frees up capacity within the client organisation to focus on critical business imperatives.

“It’s for this reason, above all, that we chose to partner with Huawei Cloud, as this partnership enables SEIDOR to automate, facilitate and improve various aspects of the client’s business. For example, it enables the migration of legacy or on-premise workloads to the cloud,” he says.

“The pandemic, of course, accelerated the move to the cloud, due to the need for everyone to work remotely. For a brief period, the biggest concern we faced was migrating our customers to the cloud, moving their systems there, or providing them with mobile computing, and setting up VPNs for security, to enable a work from- home environment.”

He adds that this experience demonstrated to most businesses how safe the cloud is, that the tools to leverage it properly exist, and that they’re not that expensive, proving that any organisation can adopt them, regardless of its size.

Terrence Chowles, project director at SEIDOR Africa, points out the above is amply proven by Huawei Cloud’s ability to easily stretch from providing a simple, agile and cost-sensitive deployment for SMEs, to delivering a large-scale implementation for huge corporates. Huawei, he notes, has a range of solutions that enable businesses to piece together the best solution for their company, utilising a building block approach.

“In South Africa especially, there are a number of reasons why switching to the cloud is beneficial. For example, when there is loadshedding, businesses would be unable to run any on-premise computing, whereas once you are in the cloud, you only need to be able to connect. Another strong reason to adopt the cloud is the difficulty in employing people with cloud expertise, due to a shortage of skills in this arena,” he adds.

“There are also different cloud benefits, depending on the size of the organisation, with SMEs especially benefiting from the ability to pay a fee to simply consume such a service, rather than requiring the skills necessary to configure and implement the cloud themselves. On the other hand, enterprises benefit mainly from the improved security, data sovereignty and ability to connect without exposing the organisation to any risks.”

According to Guangyuan Zhou, Director: Ecosystem Partner Development at Huawei Cloud Sub-Saharan Africa, the company is pleased to partner with SEIDOR, as the entire team, from the MD down to the unit directors, is both professional and very focused. He says the company wants partners who clearly understand Huawei’s capabilities and services, as this means they are able to leverage these effectively. This, he adds, is exactly what SEIDOR does, so the cooperation between the organisations is fantastic.

Guangyuan (Lori) Zhou, Director: Ecosystem Partner Development, Huawei Cloud Sub-Saharan Africa

“We look forward to taking things to new heights with SEIDOR as we build a strong, long-term partnership throughout the African region. We view them as a strategic partner, and essentially as an extension of our sales force; we always treat our partners as if they are part of Huawei itself and so we value the customers they serve, as SEIDOR then sells our solutions to its end-customers,” he says. “From a relationship point of view, our businesses have the same values and focus on serving the customer. To improve their service further, we offer marketing support, alongside free certified training. We will also undertake free proof-of-concept trials as a value add, to ensure the end-customer can see how it works and that it delivers value.”

Lopes suggests that SEIDOR’s own aim is to develop the business into a ‘cloud first’ service provider.

“Ultimately, we want to assist our clients to digitise and migrate their businesses to the cloud, and expect that going forward, we will deliver mainly cloud solutions, unless the customer has a specific on-premises need.

“Huawei, of course, supports us in building the right solution, at the right price, for the right market. They help to ensure the client doesn’t under- or over-consume, yet as their business grows, they have a solution that can be tweaked to suit their specific growth path. Our own ambition as a business is to be one of the top, if not the top, cloud vendor for Huawei. We aim to keep growing and delivering additional and improved services to our clients, thanks to the strong relationship between our two businesses,” he concludes.

Connect with SEIDOR:

www.seidor.com/en-ss/cloud-infrastructure-solutions

Email: info@seidornetworks.com

Connect with HUAWEI CLOUD: www.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/

Email: huaweicloudsa@huawei.com