Liquid Telecom, the leading pan-African telecoms group recently entered into a ground breaking partnership with the world’s leading tech giant Microsoft. The marriage will see Liquid Telecom delivering various Microsoft cloud services and other products over its robust fibre optic network which spans across the African continent.
Through its CloudConnect service, the telecom giant will be offering direct private connections to Microsoft’s South African ExpressRoute locations allowing businesses of all sizes in Africa to have private access to Azure on their own continent.
Last week, Liquid Telecom hosted the Microsoft Azure Accelerator Conference in Harare, bringing a galaxy of technology experts from Microsoft and its various group division. The major speakers who presented on various emerging cloud technology trends included Ben Roberts – Liquid Telecom Group’s Chief Technology Information Officer, Ryno Rijnsburger – Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer 4Africa, Winston Ritson – Liquid Telecom Group’s Head of Cloud Services, Chris Lwanga – Microsoft’s Senior Director, Software Partnerships.
All these experts took turns to demystify the emergence of cloud services across the globe and their direct impact to Africa’s way of doing business. Some of the major conversations which tool center stage included the Importance of Cloud, Africa’s Digital Transformation, Emerging Cloud Trends, Network Readiness For Cloud and various researches made on Cloud Computing so far.
Speaking at the same business function, Liquid Telecom Zimbabwe’s Deputy Managing Director – Martin Mushambadope said ” We don’t sell price at Liquid Telecom, we sell solutions which makes us your suitable partner in growing your business. That is our strengths as a leading player in the digital space and have no intentions of relinquishing that position any time soon in the market”
From Left to Right: Martin Mushambadope – The Liquid Telecom Zim Deputy MD, and Ben Roberts – The Liquid Telecom Group’s Chief Technology & Innovations Officer during the Microsoft Azure Accelerator Conference in Harare last week.
“Cloud services rely heavily on connectivity, that is why we have combined our expansive reach, strategically located Data Centres, innovative digital services and premium partners to drive the African Cloud revolution” added Mushambadope.
To support access to Azure services, Liquid Telecom is adding CloudConnect nodes to over 25 Points of Presence (PoPs) across Africa, and is also making major upgrades to Liquid Telecom data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town to meet the needs of global cloud players and enterprise customers.
As an official Cloud Solution Provider, Liquid Telecom is now serving businesses of all sizes in Africa with cloud services and products, such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Office 365, Enterprise Mobility Suite and Windows 10. The agreement with Microsoft brings together enterprise-grade reliability and performance from the Azure cloud with Liquid Telecom’s award-winning fibre network.
ExpressRoute can support businesses for scenarios such as periodic data migration, replication for business continuity, disaster recovery and other high-availability strategies. It can be a cost-effective option for transferring large amounts of data, such as datasets for high-performance computing applications, or moving large virtual machines between your dev-test environment in an Azure virtual private cloud and your on-premises production environment.
Liquid Telecom is also expanding its award-winning East Africa Data Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, which currently houses 2,000 square metres of secured space for data servers over four floors. Along with further expansion of its two state-of-the-art data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town, Liquid Telecom data centres are home to fibre routes of many major carriers, MNOs, cloud service providers and financial institutions.
