There was a mild stir in the local technology media last year when BCX said it was partnering with Alibaba Cloud to distribute its products in South Africa.
The deal was signed in Thailand in September, which was presumably seen as some kind of neutral ground, and a photograph of the signing ceremony shows a host of people, including Jonas Bogoshi, BCX CEO, flanked by Selina Yuan, Alibaba group vice president, while the dumpling-shaped Alibaba cloud mascot Yun Xiao Bao hovered nearby. Also in the picture were Julian Liebenberg, BCX chief of cloud platform solutions, and Jan Bouwer, the chief of digital platform solutions. They told Brainstorm recently how they see the new cloud service fitting into their business plans.
Clearly, the Alibaba entrance is a big deal. It’s one of the world’s largest hyperscalers with about 5% of the global market, and it says it’s in the top three globally as far as Infrastructure-as-a-Service is concerned. It also says it’s the leading IaaS provider by revenue in Asia Pacific, with around a quarter of the market. Worldwide, it now has 86 availability zones in 28 regions, and it’s expected to build a pair of datacentres in South Africa next year, adding to the ones it built in Saudi Arabia, Germany, Thailand and South Korea in 2022. Its cloud division brought in around $3.870 million for the quarter at the end of last year. But the company has also faced regulatory pressures from Beijing, and was hamstrung, like many other Chinese firms, by the country’s strict pandemic lockdowns. Then there’s the matter of the growing animosity between the United States and China, and there were reports last year that the US wanted to know how the company was storing US clients’ data.
Alibaba Cloud’s stack is called Apsara, and BCX will be lighting this up in its own datacentre in June. It will also put an instance in a partner colo datacentre, but won’t disclose which facility this is. These will serve as the two points of presence in South Africa until Alibaba builds its own datacentres in the country by the end of 2024.
What do customers want?
Bouwer from BCX says the Apsara software is exactly the same as one you’ll find in all the Alibaba hyperscale environments all over the world. BCX is now busy looking at which parts of it will initially fire up, and will start with all its infrastructure services, after which it will gradually bring in other services. Alibaba and BCX will jointly invest in building the datacentres.
With regards to cloud, what do BCX’s customers want?
Liebenberg says it’s a mixed picture; some companies have thrown in their lot with a hyperscaler, and are now concerned about the cost, while others are wondering how to optimise their workloads that are now in the cloud.
BCX offers private clouds as well as its own managed service, which it calls One Cloud, and has partnerships with AWS, Azure, Huawei, and now Alibaba.
It also acquired cloud solutions provider DotCom for an undisclosed sum, it announced early this year, which, it’s thought, will strengthen its cloud advisory capabilities.
“We lacked the capability to do proper cloud advisory and consulting for our clients and to assist them in their cloud journeys and jointly determine what that end state should look like,” says Bouwer.
It’s also important to convince the wider business community to buy into the cloud journey, he adds, including the CEO and the CFO, as this is not a decision to be taken by just the CIO.
He says that although BCX has the exclusive distribution rights for Alibaba Cloud in South Africa, where it makes sense to use Azure, it will recommend this.
How does BCX work out which hyperscaler will be the best fit for a customer?
The right fit
Liebenberg says it’s consulting with a financial institution at the moment, one with some decidedly aged infrastructure. Its virtualisation licences are also due to expire. BCX recommended that it move to its One Cloud service, and part of the customer’s workloads will now be brought up on Alibaba. As it happens, the company also has a Microsoft estate, and this will go the way of Azure. As can be expected from a financial services business, it has a complex database environment.
“We had to be very careful with this because if you split your database from your main application, you could incur lots of egress traffic charges. So you have to keep those together.
“There isn’t a single answer for this customer, but Alibaba did make sense because its pure Infrastructure-as-a-Service is cheaper and has better economies than some of the other choices in the market.”
On the subject of alternatives, Bouwer mentions the Alibaba relational SQL database, which it calls OceanBase, and which, he says, will cost about 60% that of Oracle, and staff won’t need to be retrained.
There isn’t a single answer for this customer, but Alibaba did make sense because its pure Infrastructure-as-a-Service is cheaper and has better economies than some of the other choices in the market.
Julian Liebenberg, BCX
Have any of its customers put some workloads in the cloud and then decided they wanted to pull them out?
Bouwer mentions an unnamed retailer that started using some cloud services and then realised it was too costly, and went back into its datacentre.
Liebenberg recounts another customer telling him how they’d moved some workloads to a cloud, and then ‘something went wrong’.
“The customer said, ‘I didn’t know who to phone’. A month earlier, they’d have phoned Jan or me, but that’s not the nature of the relationship (with a cloud provider). It’s difficult to imagine…when you click that button, you’re saying, ‘Move this data there (to the cloud)’. It’s so easy. But then you see a version of a document that is not what you expected it to be. Who, exactly, do you phone?”
The 'Chinese thing'
Are there any concerns from local customers that Alibaba and Huawei are Chinese companies?
Liebenberg says Huawei has been loyal to customers in South Africa and delivers what it promises.
“Of course, we have customers who favour American brands, and those who favour Chinese brands, but I wouldn’t say there’s been anyone who has walked away from Huawei.”
Bouwer says that after it signed the first letter of intent with Alibaba, it had ‘tested the market’ with some of its big clients. “We shared its vertical solutions with some of our retail and banking customers and all of them were very positive, and not once did the ‘Chinese thing’ come up,” he says.
He adds that there is plenty of interest from African countries in the Apsara stack, and when the zones are active, it can support the rest of Africa, from South Africa.
With all these clouds, how does a business choose?
Liebenberg says this will only be a problem if there are 10 cloud providers offering exactly the same thing.
This is one reason why BCX follows a multicloud approach, and acknowledges that ‘not one single provider fixes everything’.
* This feature was first published in the April edition of ITWeb's Brainstorm magazine.
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