Vodacom launches Africa’s first Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outposts Innovation Lab

Vodacom, a leading and purpose-led African connectivity, digital and financial services company, launches Africa's first Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outposts Innovation Lab in collaboration with AWS and Intel. The laboratory will focus on accelerating technology innovations across different industries, delivering faster scalability, and creating the opportunity to use infrastructure and technologies to solve business challenges.

The laboratory is expected to help enterprise and public sector customers of Vodacom Business to accelerate their digital transformation journey by building, managing, and scaling their local applications using AWS services and tools. The long term impact of the laboratory is that customers will, through the use of new technologies, be able to save time and money in how they run their businesses, as well as create enhanced experiences for their own customers. Vodacom's customers can now reach out to Vodacom to validate their hybrid use cases and test their workloads on AWS Outposts before deploying them in production.

The laboratory, located in Johannesburg, will serve as a Proof of Concept (POC) setup for customers to test their applications and environment for performance on AWS Outposts. Intel-powered AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that is designed to provide AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to virtually any on-premises or edge location. It enables the running of applications that have low latency, data residency, and local data processing needs on premises, while reducing the time, resources, and operational risk required to procure, manage, and upgrade on-premises infrastructure.

To bring synergies together

AWS Outposts, powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors, offer the same Amazon EC2 infrastructure-as-a-service on the edge as in the cloud. With consistent, low-latency edge infrastructure, your on-premises applications running on AWS Outposts can be seamlessly migrated to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and back and therefore, allow you to place your workloads securely where they perform the best—from edge to cloud.

Intel is working with AWS to promote the laboratory's offering and Vodacom leverages its position as an APN member to test and deliver the migration to AWS Outposts.

Vodacom Business Managing Executive for Cloud, Hosting & Security, Kabelo Makwane says, "We are extremely proud to collaborate with AWS in rolling out AWS Outposts on the continent. This is testament to the AWS managed cloud professional services capability Vodacom Business has amassed over the last few years, together with our world class tier certified datacentres that meet AWS's high global standards. This offering represents a great opportunity to meet our customers' demands for AWS hybrid cloud on and off-premises—often a barrier to cloud adoption in more regulated industries where privacy and control of sensitive data and information are important considerations."

"While customers are increasingly looking to leverage cloud technologies for faster innovation, some workloads need to remain on-premises where data residency is paramount or where every millisecond counts," said Vinod Krishnan, Partner Development Lead for Europe Emerging Markets at AWS. "Our customers across various industries such as financial services, healthcare and life science, gaming, media and entertainment, mining, manufacturing, retail & logistics, and public sector have been using Intel-powered AWS Outposts for their on-premises workloads. With AWS Outposts, customers can write their applications once and deploy them anywhere using the same AWS infrastructure, services, and APIs. We're delighted that the AWS Outposts Innovation Lab at Vodacom allows for our joint customers to see a truly consistent hybrid experience in action and gives them confidence in migrating to AWS Outposts for deployments at a larger scale. We look forward to working with Vodacom and Intel to help our joint customers accelerate cloud adoption and business innovations."