IT services company BCX has partnered with Microsoft to help local organisations migrate their applications, data and infrastructure to Microsoft Azure Cloud and Microsoft Office 365.
Julian Liebenberg, chief of telecommunication solutions at BCX, told ITWeb the partnership is part of the company’s renewed focus on its two core business units: IT and telecommunications.
“In the telecommunications unit, we are looking at partnerships to help us offer our customers additional networking capabilities. Cloud service providers such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer cloud platforms; however, in order for the customer to maximise the potential of cloud, they require a fast and affordable network,” he says.
“So we are partnering with Microsoft to connect our network directly to the Microsoft network, offering our customers ‘the express route’, which is the shortest possible route to access the Microsoft network.”
BCX was acquired by Telkom in 2015 in a R2.67 billion deal.
The company offers consulting services as part of an IT managed services portfolio, helping medium and large organisations with architecture design, project deployment and assessment for infrastructure projects.
The BCX Microsoft consulting services also include the designing, deployment and delivery of products such as Windows Active Directory, Exchange, Skype for Business, System Centre Suite of Products, Hyper-V and Mail Migrations.
Microsoft Office 365 enables employees to access and work on the files they need anywhere, any time and from any device, while Microsoft Azure is infrastructure in the cloud, notes Liebenberg.
“In our engagement with local organisations, we come across companies that have a great digital transformation strategy in place; however, implementing that strategy comes with a myriad of challenges, including migrating their workloads to the cloud.”
The company has 13 data centres, situated in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape.
“While BCX has its own data centres, our offerings don't really compete with those of Microsoft, but rather complement each other. As a systems integrator working in a managed service environment, we help organisations manage the landscape, ensuring their workloads are securely migrated. Security is of utmost importance as oftentimes some parts of the workloads are stored in our data centres, while another part goes to the Microsoft Cloud.”
BCX wants to partner with more cloud providers, as the company eyes an AWS partnership.
“However, no partnership has been confirmed as yet with AWS,” adds Liebenberg.
BCXs IT revenue contributed positively to Telkom’s group revenue, with a growth of 6% at the end of the financial year in May.
In November, Telkom confirmed to ITWeb it would retrench some of its staff. The company said it had served the Section 189 notice on all registered unions that have union members at BCX.
“The serving of a Section 189 notice is an intention to consult and explore alternatives to avoid or minimise retrenchments,” it noted.
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