So let’s take apart Scott Guthrie’s blog, which can be found here:

May 18, 2017 – Johannesburg, South Africa – Today Microsoft revealed plans to deliver the complete, intelligent Microsoft Cloud for the first time from datacenters located in Africa. This new investment is a major milestone in the company’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and a recognition of the enormous opportunity for digital transformation in Africa.

MyPOV – Good to see the intent, in line with the general Microsoft Azure (or is it now the Microsoft Cloud?) value pitch of being the intelligent cloud.

Expanding on existing investments, Microsoft will deliver cloud services, including Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365, from datacenters located in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa with initial availability anticipated in 2018. The new cloud regions will offer enterprise-grade reliability and performance combined with data residency to help enable the tremendous opportunity for economic growth, and increase access to cloud and internet services for organizations and people across the African continent.

MyPOV – So 2018 will see the go live. No surprise there is an Office 365 and Dynamics 365 angle, two products that have to comply with data privacy and data residency legislation.

“We’re excited by the growing demand for cloud services in Africa and their ability to be a catalyst for new economic opportunities,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft Corp. “With cloud services ranging from intelligent collaboration to predictive analytics, the Microsoft Cloud delivered from Africa will enable developers to build new and innovative apps, customers to transform their businesses, and governments to better serve the needs of their citizens.”

MyPOV – Good quote from Guthrie, which also hints at the next generation application angle for developers and the government angle. Government usually require data residency.

Expanding Access & Opportunity: Currently many companies in Africa rely on cloud services delivered from outside of the continent. Microsoft’s new investment will provide highly available, scalable, and secure cloud services across Africa with the option of data residency in South Africa. With the introduction of these new cloud regions, Microsoft has now announced 40 regions around the world – more than any major cloud provider. The combination of Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure with the new regions in Africa will connect businesses with opportunity across the globe, help accelerate new investments, and improve access to cloud and internet services for people and organizations from Cairo to Cape Town.

MyPOV – South Africa is an island from a IaaS perspective. A large economy, but far away from a connectivity perspective, it’s in a similar situation like Australia, only that the IaaS vendors made it to Australia much earlier. With 40 regions Microsoft currently leads fellow competitors AWS and Google, but Microsoft does not clarify how many data centers are in one location. And to tackle reliable services in a geography, it needs to be at least, two data centers. Microsoft does not share how many data centers are in a region, but will have two regions with one each in Cape Town and Johannesburg. That should be a good answer for any HA (High Availability) concerns, though Oracle has moved the 'standard' quickly to three data centers per location / region.

“We greatly value Microsoft’s commitment to invest in cloud services delivered from Africa. Standard Bank already relies on cloud technology to provide our customers with a seamless experience,” says Brenda Niehaus, Group CIO at Standard Bank. “To achieve success as a business, we need to keep pace with market developments as well as customer needs, and Office 365 empowers us to make a culture shift towards becoming a more dynamic organization, whilst Azure enables us to deliver our apps and services to our customers in Africa. We’re looking forward to achieving even more with the cloud services available here on the continent.”

MyPOV – Always good to have launch customers and good to have them provide a quote in a press release announcing future to be used products / services.

Investing in African Innovation: This announcement expands on ongoing investments in Africa, where organizations are using currently available cloud and mobile services as a platform for innovation in health care, agriculture, education, and entrepreneurship. Microsoft has been working to support local start-ups and NGOs, unleashing innovation that has the potential to solve some of the biggest problems facing humanity, such as the scarcity of water and food, and economic and environmental sustainability. One start-up, M-KOPA Solar, provides affordable pay-as-you-go solar energy to over 500,000 homes using mobile and cloud technology. AGIN has built an app connecting 140,000 smallholder farmers to key services, enabling them to share data and facilitating $1.3 million per month in finance, insurance and other services.

MyPOV – Always good to show the potential and upside – and Africa has a lot of both. It’s not clear what M-Kopa and AGIN are or will be using from Microsoft. 

 

Across Africa, Microsoft has brought 728,000 small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) online to help them transform and modernize their businesses, and over 500,000 are now utilizing Microsoft cloud services, with 17,000 using the 4Afrika hub to promote and grow their businesses. The Microsoft Cloud is also helping Africans build job skills, with 775,000 trained on subjects ranging from digital literacy to software development. We anticipate the Microsoft Cloud from Africa will fuel extensive new opportunities for our 17,000 regional partners and customers alike.

MyPOV – Impressive numbers, the consumer and educational aspect of the Microsoft product and services portfolio has a lot of potential in Africa. On the other side it also requires Microsoft to invest into infrastructure in Africa, and this is a first step.

“This development broadens the options available to us in our modernization journey of Government ICT infrastructure and services. It allows us to take advantage of new opportunities to develop innovative government solutions at manageable costs, as well as drive overall improvements in operations management, while improving transparency and accountability,” says Dr. Setumo Mohapi, CEO at SITA.

MyPOV – Again – good to see a current / future customer quote – covering the government aspect and potential.

The Microsoft Trusted Cloud: Microsoft has deep expertise protecting data, championing privacy, and empowering customers around the globe to meet extensive security and privacy requirements. With Microsoft’s Trusted Cloud principles of security, privacy, compliance, transparency, and the broadest set of compliance certifications and attestations in the industry, Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure supports over a billion customers and 20 million businesses around the globe. […]

MyPOV – Good to see Microsoft stressing the security aspect. As in every new geographic region where the cloud arrives, there is a large group of skeptical CxOs and security concerns are at the top of their list of reasons why they cannot move to the cloud. These concerns need to be addressed. There is no reason though why these concerns cannot be addressed as well in South Africa like they have in the rest of the world… with a broadly favorable outcome for the cloud.

 

Overall MyPOV

Always good to see IaaS vendors adding locations to their global clouds. South Africa is a key possession from the combination of GDP and remoteness toward network backbones. Australia has similar characteristics, but has a 4x larger GDP, so no surprise the global monopoly game between the IaaS vendors has seen Australia see the respective IaaS flags earlier than South Africa. But now it is South Africa, and with that Africa’s turn. And Africa (after Asia) is the world’s second largest continent – from a population perspective. As such Africa is key for Microsoft for all its offerings, as the press release outlines: For Office usage, for Dynamics usage and for getting strongly locally rooted customers (like governments) on the Microsoft cloud.

On the concern side, there is little to address. Microsoft is large enough to make the CAPEX happen, the question is only, which geographies got trumped by South Africa. But that’s what we learn soon from the next data center location announcement. And then South African data centers will likely not be efficient to service any economy north of the equator, e.g. the African Mediterranean rim is likely served better from Europe. And then there is the prize of the first Middle Eastern data center. And that Microsoft does not shy away from network investments can be seen from the recent MAREA cable announcement (with Facebook  see here), which will hit Europe closer to Africa than any other transatlantic cable, in Bilbao (Spain).

But for now, congrats to Microsoft – that between the three large providers (add AWS and Google) is the first with an announcement for a South African location. Even going further down the provider list to e.g. IBM, Oracle and SAP (though SAP may not push the IaaS build out now) – Microsoft has made the first announcement / move towards South Africa / Africa. So, congrats are in order.