Shaun Barendsen, HDS General Manager for sub-Saharan Africa, says HDS has been increasingly active in Kenya through its channel partners over the past three years. “However, with huge potential for growth and increasing interest in our cloud, data storage and secure collaboration solutions from customers in the region, we are now establishing a permanent office in Nairobi to support our channel partners in Kenya,” he says.
The Kenyan office, to be headed by Aiyaz Shroff, Regional Manager – East Africa, will open on 31 October with a core team of local resources including sales, pre-sales and engineering staff. The team will be backed by skills from South Africa as well as resources from the wider HDS community that is represented in over one hundered countries globally, while the continuous upskilling of channel partners in the country will also be a core focus.
The new office will run HDS operations in the region and work with partners and customers, to present work-through solutions and additional training and support.
Barendsen says much of HDS’s focus in the region has been on the financial and telcos sectors to date, but that large enterprises across verticals can derive value from the solutions. “We are seeing increasing demand from enterprises across Africa for solutions that enhance management of the data centre environment and allow enterprises to discover, analyse and realise more value from their data. The key issues for African data centres are much the same as they are globally – to drive down complexity, reduce cost and get more value from the stored data.”
On top of its world-class advanced cloud and storage solutions, HDS differentiates itself through a consultative approach, says Barendsen. “HDS and our channel partners seek to understand our clients’ business needs and use our leading solutions to add business value and drive growth,” he says. ”
