About Seidor Networks
Seidor Networks, a Platinum SAP Partner and a Huawei Cloud Consulting and Solution Partner, provides managed services ranging from monitoring, support and firewalling to Internet connectivity, hosting and security services. Seidor Networks is focused on SAP B1 and provides fully managed SaaS services to customers in 19 industry verticals. They are the largest SAP B1 partner in Africa and are Platinum SAP partners. They signed up as Huawei Cloud Consulting and Solution Partner in 2020.
Challenges
Seidor Networks (Africa) has been experiencing significant growth and rapid expansion on the African continent. With increasingly complex SAP workloads and growing demand for a variety of solutions, Seidor needed a more agile, resilient cloud platform and more cost-efficient services that are easier to deploy and operate. "Due to cost efficiency considerations, we decided to not only build our SAP solution on AWS and Azure. We needed a more agile and elastic solution but we didn't have time for all of the discussions involving architectural planning, machine sizing, and procurement processes. Huawei Cloud assigned a professional business development and technical team to suit our requirements. That is why we decided to adopt HUAWEI CLOUD” says Darryl Maroun, Managing Director of Seidor Networks South Africa.
Pain Points
Increasing operational costs and low profit margins: "AWS is more like a black box running and consuming much of the budget, not easy to tune for suitable flavors according to different types of workloads" said Juan Pierre Prinsloo, an O&M personnel at Seidor Networks.
Limited O&M control: Seidor not only pays for AWS cloud services, but also pays ultra O&M fees for a 3rd-party team, which generate significant costs for a cloud platform that is not central to their business.
No local support team: The cloud service providers Seidor is currently working with do not have dedicated, local support teams, leading to slow responses to Seidor requests.
Solution
Huawei Cloud South Africa team worked closely with Seidor infrastructure team and finalized Huawei Cloud IaaS architecture for SAP and SAP B1. Huawei Cloud provided a dedicated infrastructure team of IT experts to advice on best practices to simplify operations, reduce deployment time, and slash operational and hosting costs.
Huawei Cloud business development and cloud solution architects accompanied Seidor throughout the digital transformation. Huawei Cloud played a key role in helping Seidor comply with all the security, business continuity, and technical requirements. The Huawei cloud solution comprising of ECS, OBS, network services, and database services provides full security and regulatory compliance. Now with the second availability zone launched locally in Africa, Seidor can use other integrated services such as disaster recovery, backup, and load balancing to increase the availability of services even further.
Benefits
The improved support services made operations and control easier than ever. The maintenance time was shortened by 30%. Seidor Networks can now quickly expand into east and West Africa.
There are more cost savings. Following the successful SAP/SAP B1 workload hosting on Huawei Cloud, Seidor Networks went on to move ERP workloads to Huawei Cloud, leading to additional 20% lower operations and management costs compared to when using similar infrastructure services from AWS.
In 2021, Seidor will leverage Huawei Cloud as an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to create a fully integrated control model. Seidor is also pursuing some other ambitious plans like multi-cloud orchestration and they will potentially use more Huawei cloud services to drive their business forward.
Testimonies
Terrence Chowles, Project Director of Seidor Networks South Africa.
"We were safe in the knowledge that our systems would be stable and available at all times. We had made enough progress with the project to reap the benefits in this situation. The speed of the cloud made it possible to effectively and efficiently manage systems while working from home"
Juan Pierre Prinsloo, Infrastructure Manager of Seidor Networks.
"These systems are critical. If they go down, it results in high financial losses. That’s why the move to Huawei Cloud marked a real milestone for us. Everything has been running smoothly and safely ever since"
