HDS Opens East Africa Office in Kenya

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation is opening its East Africa hub in Kenya to host their data systems business.

The company believes there is an increasing demand from enterprises across Africa for solutions that enhances management of the data center environment and allow enterprises to discover, analyze and realize more value from their data. The key issues for African data centers are much the same as they are globally – to drive down complexity, reduce cost and get more value from the stored data.

Ben Jooste, regional manager for Sub Saharan Africa, HDS, says the company has a $5 billion dedicated to R&D each year, 20% of this fund is directed to IT systems. Despite being late in the East Africa market, compared to Oracle and IBM, HDS is determined that their storage solutions will be adopted in this market.

Jooste believes competition won’t be a problem since they have experienced the same in the other markets like South Africa and the UK. For example, on the enterprise storage market specialization in the UK, the company wants to replicate what they have done with major telecommunication companies in East Africa.

Hitachi has a strategy of growth in this region and will achieve this by examining employees’ skillset, carefully investing their funds and how they execute their market goals and objectives. In terms of human resource, Hitachi has invested in the local community (Kenya) and resources to build a team locally to develop the economy and skillset.

Some of the training covered by the company includes pre-sales and sales, business development and engineering roles. This entails the spectrum of what they provide and from a resource perspective Hitachi looks at acquiring the best of breed to provide value to their customers.

“We also have an indirect model in Kenya that looks at a selected number of partners that Hitachi can focus its energy to help the customers“, says Jooste. “It is a joint effort of investing on these resources and that the partners are fully enabled to serve the customers better.”

Hitachi has partnered with Computech Limited as their distributor in Kenya and it has set up three hubs in Africa – East, West and Southern Africa to facilitate market penetration in these regions. The company looks at how these partners operate and sign contracts across all market verticals; they are strong in the U-telco sector, banking, and insurance sectors as well as the public sector.

Jooste says the company’s business model is a consultancy approach in all these sectors, based on storage capacity; they are continuously shifting towards a holistic solution approach by working with partners to help customers understand where their businesses are headed.

“Its more about understanding their challenges and building our solutions around these challenges then use their intelligence around these data and help them find business value from it,” says Jooste.

Author of this article, Peter Nalika generates technical content for CIO East Africa and the International Data Group News Service. He also contributes to PC World and Computer World. He is classically trained in computing and information management, and he is currently pursing an MBA program in Management Information Systems at the University of Nairobi.