Telkom Subsidiary, BCX, Prepares Channels for Sell of Alibaba Cloud
Two channel partners will be appointed by Telkom subsidiary BCX to resell Alibaba Cloud services in South Africa and the rest of Africa. Following the signing of an exclusive agreement with Alibaba Cloud to introduce the Chinese company’s services to the South African market, BCX CEO Jonas Bogoshi made this statement in an interview with ITWeb last week.
According to Bogoshi, BCX will either sell Alibaba Cloud directly or indirectly to the market as part of its go-to-market plan. He noted that company will essentially replace Alibaba in South Africa. As a result, they will have two different go-to-market strategies.
“The first one is using our own internal teams to sell directly to our end-users. Number two, we will have to adopt or appoint other partners to go and sell to the base. As an example, there are some independent system integrators who will be buying from us and selling to their customers.
“The typical hardware distributors now sell cloud. So if you look at the top two distributors in the country, they sell cloud via their resellers. So we have already spoken to two of them. We haven’t appointed them yet but we’ve already spoken to them and they will be our channel partners, both in South Africa and the rest of the continent, because some of them have got resellers across the continent, so we’ll be covering the entire market through that.”
Bogoshi claims that BCX will use Alibaba Cloud to primarily target the financial services, healthcare, and retail industries. All of the vertical solutions that Alibaba has developed over time will be brought to market by BCX. In the public sector, retail, healthcare, and financial services, there are currently more than 200 vertical solutions. Therefore, BCX have determined some of the major applications. “We have tested them with some of our large enterprises and they can see value in those applications. We’ll be taking that to market. So broadly speaking, that’s our go-to-market on this partnership.”
Julian Liebenberg, BCX’s head of cloud platform solutions, also participated in the interview and said that in order to scale Alibaba Cloud, the business would begin hiring and training its personnel. He added that BCX had employees in this field of work, and are also in the process of rescaling and will start hiring soon.
Bogoshi thinks Alibaba Cloud still has a chance to compete with AWS and Azure, despite its late entry into the South African market.
“Worldwide, you can see that all of these hyperscalers do co-exist because customers are looking for choice. So that’s what we see out there. That’s the first thing. But secondly, I think you are aware that Google is also looking at coming in to the country.
“So I think there will be a big demand in the coming few years and that’s why all of us are expecting to see growth from cloud services. So yes, there is an advantage for somebody being the first one, but that doesn’t mean there is no demand to be fulfilled by subsequent entrants.”