Westcon has announced that Microsoft’s cloud platform, Microsoft Azure, has launched through the group’s channel in South Africa.<\/p>\n
Microsoft has been providing Azure services for South African customers for some time, through its worldwide network of Microsoft Datacentres.<\/p>\n
The announcement of the the launch on Friday (1 August) pertains to the Westcon channel for the Microsoft cloud services, which will offer more flexible packages for customers.<\/p>\n
Microsoft announced that Azure would be made available through Open Volume Licensing programs in May 2014. The offering works by purchasing an Online Service Activation (OSA) Key from resellers, on a 12-month contract basis.<\/p>\n
From there, Azure in Open monetary credits can be used on any Azure Service which is eligible.<\/p>\n
“The introduction of Azure through Open allows partners\/resellers to provide the services to customers without having to do the billing on a credit card and to consume services on a pay as you go bundle, and also build their own solutions on Azure and resell these solutions,” the group said.<\/p>\n
Westcon could not provide pricing or package details by the time of publishing.<\/p>\n
According to Westcon, small and medium sized businesses could save up to 50% of their current technology investment if they consider an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model for their business.<\/p>\n
“The Microsoft Azure platform enables a customer to quickly build, deploy and manage their IT solutions, all the while having the system securely hosted in a series of networked Microsoft-managed datacentres,” the group said.<\/p>\n
“Because of its open nature it is easy to build home-grown applications on the Azure platform using any language, tool or framework.<\/p>\n
Microsoft Azure is operated through the European data center, with local caching in South Africa.<\/p>\n
According to Westcon, there are no current talks for the development of a physical node in the country.<\/p>\n
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