Leading South African ICT solutions provider XON announced that it had partnered with Symantec to offer cloud services in South Africa. As a Symantec Gold Partner, XON has invested heavily in the creation of high-end skills in this area, making it one of the most qualified and experienced Symantec partners to offer such solutions.
“Regardless of which industry they are in, customers want a managed service that comes with a guaranteed outcome for a predictable, monthly flat fee. It means that customers do not have to pay for costly on-site security resources, nor do they have to pay exorbitant licensing costs. Everything is included in the monthly fee, which is great news in a sluggish economy as it comes out of the operating expenditure budget rather than capex. In addition, these services can be rolled out to customers in a matter of days.” says Deon Prinsloo, divisional head of hardware and software at XON.
Symantec launched its 15th cloud data centre – its first in Africa – early in 2011, creating the infrastructure and data centre facilities for the .cloud services. The Symantec.cloud services immediately available are the e-mail security family of services, comprising anti-spam, anti-virus, image control and content control, as well as Enterprise Vault.cloud service – the premier hosted mail archiving solution available in the market today.
“We prioritised the services that were in highest demand which have made these services available to both the corporate and SME market segments. Many cloud vendors started out in the SME space and are now trying to grow into the corporate and enterprise sector, whereas Symantec.cloud has been successful across the market spectrum since inception.” says Mark Smissen, business development manager for cloud in sub-Saharan Africa, Symantec.
Symantec’s cloud strategy is particularly suited to sub-Saharan Africa, where IT skills are in short supply. “We commoditise services into the cloud and in return our customers enjoy a managed outcome, freeing them up to focus scarce skills on their business,” says Smissen.
