Kathy Gibson reports from Nutanix .Next in Washington DC – Skills shortages and an often-patchy infrastructure are among the challenges that African CIOs have to contend with – and it’s why they are increasingly turning to partners who can provide less complex solutions, says Franz Esser, strategic business manager: enterprise cloud solutions at ET Works.
“For our African customers, the skills gap is a big thing,” Esser says. “Nutanix has helped us to offer solutions that are simple to use, so they are adopted and accepted quickly.”
Another challenge that African companies grapple with is poor bandwidth and connectivity, particularly in remote operations. This is limiting their ability to adopt advanced technology on the edge.
“When you are operating with a low-bandwidth link, a solution like Nutanix supplies an efficient way of dealing with it,” Esser says.
ET Works is a value-added reseller and managed service provider with a wide footprint in Africa.
Esser points out that African IT organisations, like their peers around the world, are under pressure to help their businesses leverage technology to stay competitive and profitable.
Customers are typically deploying virtualised infrastructures, with African organisations often circumventing connectivity issues by running on bare metal.
And, like many other customers, African organisations have found themselves in a hypervisor quandary with shake-ups affecting their traditional suppliers.
“They have to go somewhere, and Nutanix was there at the right time, with a solution and a pathway out,” Esser says.
“So we have seen a natural shift taking place as many of our customers in Africa migrate to Nutanix.”
On a more strategic level, enterprises around the world now recognise that they need to innovate their IT or risk becoming irrelevant.
“IT organisations have seen the writing on the wall,” Esser continues. “CIOs need to be in a position to serve the business needs, to be an enabler to the business. The businesses they work for are changing rapidly, and they don’t want to work with technology vendors that don’t support them on their journey.
“If you have an artificial intelligence (AI) problem and a container problem, many traditional vendors won’t be able to help you. With Nutanix, however, there is a can-do attitude when it comes to containers, databases, or AI – they understand and can help.”
What this means is that partners can rely on a single vendor to meet a range of business needs.
“It allows us to go to our customers with a best-of-breed solution, without making any compromises,” Esser says.
ET Works started out as a UK company in the early 1990s, and expanded from there into the Nordics and South Africa, which they established when they acquired Esser’s local services company EuroTech.
The South African office is based in Cape Town and services about 50 Nutanix customers in 35 countries across the continent.
Although it’s a relatively small company, Esser says ET Works competes successfully with much larger companies. He attributes this to the strong core of technical skills at all levels of the company.
It’s UK customers include the Science Museum Group, Royal Opera House, NHS, and Robert Gordon University.
In South Africa, ET Works partners with Syntell, Jonsson Workwear, Wesgro, and Hellmann Worldwide Logistics among other customers that include top global energy companies and defence contractors, where it delivers managed infrastructure services (MIS) for Nutanix.
“Nutanix is the biggest and fastest-growing part of the business,” Esser says. “We deliver end-to-end point solutions and all the services that wrap around that: professional services, deployment, and managed IT services.”