Safaricom is the biggest telecom in Kenya and one of the biggest mobile money players in East Africa with its Mpesa division. Now, the telco has partnered with Amazon web services (AWS) to create an America-East Africa relation to avail cloud services in the region
The Amazon * Safaricom partnership is not the first for an American Tech company to join hands with an African brand. Previously, Microsoft partnered with Liquid Telecom to offer cloud services to African start-ups
Unlike Microsoft’s extension of Azure services via Liquid Telecom which is focused on helping young tech companies grow with startups seen as the key cloud clients. The Safaricom AWS infrastructure is more dedicated to hosting businesses than leveraging the startup ecosystem.
According to the Acting Safaricom CEO, the telco chose Amazon Web services (AWS) because it offers customers the deepest and broadest cloud platform as he said:
We chose to partner with AWS because it offers customers the broadest and deepest cloud platform…This agreement will allow us to accelerate our efforts to enable digital transformation in Kenya
Michael Joseph – CEO Safaricom
What the New Safaricom * Amazon partnership means for East Africa
At the moment, Amazon is trying to extend its e-commerce portal to Africa since it doesn’t ship most of its items to the region. Excitingly, with the extension of its cloud platform through Safaricom, we could see the Amazon.africa domain coming to life as the case-is in other countries
With Microsoft Azure available through Liquid Telecom, developers will further enjoy the compettitive landascape that will be offered by both AWS and Azure. In return, cloud prices could meet new lows to accommodate the African economy structure
In East Africa, the Safaricom cloud platform will join local data centers offering cloud services and this means competitive prices from all providers.
In Uganda, Raxio launched as the First Tier III data center with cloud capabilities, once it goes live, its offerings will have to share the same competition landscape as Azure and AWS in East Africa.
Well, with Safaricom’s partnership with Amazon to offer cloud services in Kenya and East Africa is a straight head to head competition sniff with Microsoft that launched an Africa development center in Nairobi last year, and businesses will benefit more from the competition since the latter promises lower fees than AWS.