Known for its undersea optical fiber cables, Seacom is expected to make their first move into offering cloud services today Thursday 11th April 2013 with the launch of their Pamoja Cloud Services
Pamoja is a cloud services marketplace that the company says will revolutionize the way the SME sector conducts business. Seacom becomes the second infrastructure company to move into this space after Safaricom who launched their service about a year ago.
Pamoja’s business model is “built on the growing demand for IT-as-a-Service from small and medium enterprises (SME), coupled with the need for service providers to increase the value of their existing offerings and grow broadband revenue.” Pamoja is building a SME Cloud services marketplace, which it will then offer to its channel partners and service providers to on-sell under their own brand (white-labelled) to their customer base.
It is expected to “remove the capital expense barrier to entry for International content owners who want to expand their service footprint to the African continent; no upfront capital investment is required,” the statement said.
Pamoja is investing, initially, in Cloud computing infrastructure in South Africa and Kenya. This will allow Pamoja to service the Southern African markets with a strong focus on South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia. From the Kenyan based platform services will be delivered to Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and South Sudan.
Credit: CIO
Problem is the underpinning technology is Microsoft driven rather than Linux. I just can’t feel this is the right choice as compared to Amazon, Rackspace, or any of the other large cloud providers. I see outages in Pamoja’s future.