On-premises solutions in Namibia: Exploring your future options

Good afternoon, everyone, and, wishing everybody a great session this afternoon. I see we still have some of our clients joining, so we're just gonna start and kick off and see if we can start the conversation. Today is specifically for our Namibian clients, And, we really hope that you can see Marita and Ludie as both sitting in Namibia, and me and Brad are sitting in Pretoria. So, let's just look at what we are gonna have as part of our conversation today. And as you could see from our invite, EPU is basically presenting this afternoon on premises solutions in Namibia, exploring your future options. And I do have Brad and Ludie that will chat with us. I'll introduce them as we go along. We're mindful that we do have a webinar this afternoon. So webinar is a little bit of a one way communication. We do have the chat, and, we only have forty minutes. And then what we hope to see is from here to continue the conversations with you as a specific client. You have access to all of us around the table, and, we're really just gonna continue the conversation. So I'm gonna start to say, listen, Marita, you are your contact in Namibia. We're specifically doing this webinar only for, our Namibian customers, as I said earlier. And, Marita, maybe a special word of welcome from your side. Thank you, Marlyse. Can everybody hear me? I think so. Yeah. Since I've been busy with the Namibian market and getting a bit more in involved with their lives, I understand that I think there's challenges that we have here in Namibia that might not be in South Africa, on a part of the world, and opportunities to discuss those challenges might be limited. So we hope today that you'll get answers to questions, and that events like this and seminars like this or webinars like this will really help in future to, give more opportunities for information and information sharing. Welcome to the session. Thanks, Marlys. Thank you. Thanks, Marita. So the big question today that we want to try to answer, is cloud an option to consider in Namibia, and are on premises solutions still cost effective? So there's quite a lot of talk on that. There's quite a lot of laws that we need to look at. It also depends on the industry that you're in. And then there's also, some perceptions about cloud. And as I always say in a very light time is, the cloud is there to stay. It's not gonna go away. You can see it also, in Lily and Marita's background. And that's why today, we will not tell you what to do. We're just gonna give you an opinion. We're gonna say, listen. This is what we see in the market. And from there, we will work with you to say, listen. This is some of the options that you have in future. We will even go that far to work out how we think the road map will look in the next couple of years, and really just help you with a very important conversation. So I want to introduce you to Ludie. And as you can see on our invite, Ludie is, the CEO of I swear, which is one of the companies within EPUSE Labs. Ludie's got a lot of experience. He's on the ground. He knows exactly how to make things work in the cloud. And, Ludie, if I can then just ask you if you would just start by, explaining to everybody around the table, what do you see? What is cloud? Absolutely. So cloud is, is actually a very, very simple term. If I can kind of, explain to everybody, you know, if you originally had a server room in your organization and you had a lot of your sites connected to your server room, surprise, surprise, that is actually a cloud. That is what we consider to be a private cloud. Now you do get different types of cloud. As I've mentioned before, you get private cloud, which is traditionally, in a private data center. It might be your own hardware but managed by a provider. It might be on premise that is considered a private cloud. You company quite a lot of money, quite a lot of change, what whatever. So all we are saying is let's just think together. At least if you think together before you make that big change, it's a transformation. It's a migration. It's all the good words that we are we can think of. So I want to ask Brad then, before we move to our next poll, can we just chat a bit more about hybrid? So and why I'm saying that is what we see depending on the client, we see different environment. So for some reason, people think I'm now on premise, and now I'm moving to cloud. Yeah. And maybe there's more than that. There's different options, and then there is different hyperscalers that's convincing us this is what we need to do. But what we also see the positive is there's a journey, and maybe the journey consists of different phases. So maybe what we need to do is in the next year or two, we're gonna do certain things in preparation for what we think. In two years, maybe there's something else, and we slightly just, navigate the journey. So if you can say a bit more about the hybrid Yep. And that's maybe inevitable. I don't know. Yeah. But if you can chat a bit more about that. And yeah. Thanks, Madeliz. And I'm so happy you did tee up the hybrid thing there because it's important to understand, and I know when we did the poll, there didn't seem to be too many people worried about things like vendor lock in, but you should look what's best for your business, and you should rely on the people that are the best informed to give you that advice to steer you in the right direction. Because with all of our migrations that we've done and hosting and, you know, working with the hyperscalers, there is almost always pieces of architecture that you guys might have as business owners and as technical professionals. There might be systems sitting around that you're not too sure what to do with. And there isn't a future where you're worried that maybe I don't know how I would get this into the cloud and things, and you mustn't be scared about hybrid solutions. There is the ability to look at hosting some stuff in Azure, keeping some stuff on premises, or giving some stuff to Ludi to host a Teraco, and you look at a best of everything solution. I don't ever want you guys to think, okay, well, I've bought into AWS now, so here I am, and I just have to make do. They are the service providers to you guys, and you need to do what makes sense to you. And we've often offered client solutions where we say, let's host in AWS, but do your Doctor to Azure. And, I mean, that sounds crazy, but it is a way to spread your landscape out to have as much redundancy as possible. And, therefore, you can start benefiting from different vendors, and you can also learn about the different vendors at the same time. And as Madeli said, you know, just because you've moved to the cloud, yes, there is a migration cost if you're about to change your mind, but it is a feasible migration. So I would wanna learn as much stuff upfront as possible. But if you realize that, she's wearing a tough spot right now, we've moved some stuff to AWS, and we have no idea how to get it out there. I mean, Ludi has run some really, really interesting projects lately where he sort of just automated the sort of data replication into different areas. So it's not even a migration. It's more of just a data moving very, very quickly. So there's lots of options for you. And I think the one thing, and I mentioned it earlier, miss Solis, in my view, we must have a bit of a view on the next two years. Right. Two years might be in some cases, we have to do something this year because of whatever's happening in your hyperscalers and violence with versions. But what I would strongly recommend is and I I think, we don't have to show hands here. But if there's anybody's that's where the budget is always working out, just contact me, and we'll take it from there. But the bottom line is we must look at the next two, three, four years. Mhmm. Because part of our lot of our hyperscalers are very aggressive. They specifically vary. And let's not call it aggressive. Let's call it assertive. Just from the Rita, we call it assertive and we say, listen. Let's just look try to look a bit further because sometimes these beautiful models for the first year or two, and then suddenly people get to a point where they say, but now the cost is doubling after the first fact. It's now one year, two years, or three years. So we try to get a view a bit further. But let's move to the next poll, and I'm just gonna launch it for us. Let's just see. And that is what were the three key challenges that you see that triggers, driving, triggers driving cloud discussions. So I'm just losing my, word for a moment there. And, there you can see it. So infrastructure and end of life capacity limits. Yeah. Are you losing your infrastructure? Are you concerned that you're running out of space? Is it becoming very expensive to host an environment in your own data center? You know? And you worry you wanna go to that kind of as a service model where you start thinking, well, I don't wanna have to spend new TIN money on TIN every three years. I'd much rather get someone else to worry about the TIN than I get the latest stuff all the time. You know, the another thing we mentioned is licensing. I mean, there's a big impact to clients that are on specific operating system versions that are coming to end of life, and that would result in some kind of change or conversion or something like that. And that is the best time to start looking at one of these kind of migrations into something that will see you through for the next five to ten years, you know. And looking at, as I mentioned, around the overheads as well, you know. I know it's we all are technical people to a lesser greater degree on the call. And, you know, we're used to managing our own environments, but certain things can get very expensive. And we're always under pressure to try and reduce costs and optimize things and everything. And looking at a cloud offering like that third point around reducing IT environment overheads, that could be a driver for you. Poor system performance, I mean, that does tie into the end of life at the top there, but it could be something where your systems are slowly as upgraded as they can go, and there just needs to be a change now. Security concerns around your own environment is also very important. And then, you know, that's something that's being driven a lot recently is obviously modernization, and that can come from your functional business owners, things like that say they would like the latest and greatest or they wanna take things into the next. They wanna worry about how we handle mobile and how that goes through, and where does that go in the cloud? And can I have public facing things that my people can look at their environment, their leave, and their time, and their payroll off their network, and everything like that? I mean, these are very common things that we deal with, but how does that tie into the cloud and security and things? So these are all really interesting things to consider. K. So I think I'm gonna end that, and let's just see what is our result. Mhmm. Here's the result. We can see infrastructure and end of life capacity limits seems if that's not one of the biggest and maybe we've just selected one, doesn't matter. Mhmm. And you can see the rest then modernization requirements. So I think, we're going all good. What I then want to ask Brad is, at the end of the day, I hope we we get the message across that we want to be a trusted partner. We want to say to you, listen, it's not the best thing now to migrate to whatever our preference might be or wherever we have a partnership. But as a trusted partner and also then a technology solution architect, Brad, give you practical advice on optimizing migration strategies, including hosting, if you just want to chat a bit with us on that. Yep. And I think, it's something that at least you spoke about already, which is the fact that it is a journey and the fact that it will take a while. And the trick is to start early. You know, you need to accept the fact that something needs to change. Something needs to that the migration's gonna happen. And the thing is there's a lot of ducks that need to get in a row before that can happen, and it's about preparing your environment. The one of the biggest things that we've learned over time is getting in early and assessing an environment. We get asked as our subject matter experts to come and help a client with a migration or to run it ourselves. We the best solution the best situation we can be in is actually already being familiar with the environment. And that, I mean, that's not only for us. That stretches to you as well. You need to understand what the environment looks like, how what the future road map is, and what the milestones are above the black. And the reason I say that is because quite often and we've learned this over time. And, I mean, I've mentioned already. We've done this a bunch of times. I won't say it again probably. But, the migration's the easy part. You know? My background is SAP basis. So I had we do the nuts and the bolts and the memory and the RAM and the short dumps and all that exciting stuff for me, probably boring for most people. But the thing is that the technology is so advanced now that, once it's been planned properly, is very easy. It's the parts around that, the part where Ludy gets involved, where he has to assess what's happening with your network traffic, what are the integration points, where are you authenticating to, are we gonna move your AD to Microsoft, Are we gonna do the following things? You know, everything like that, those are the points where there are failures, and we'd add there's scope creep and everything, and that's not something we want. Because more often than not, when we've committed and we've pushed that button to actually start a migration, there is a deadline, and we can't handle not being able to do that. You know? We did a project recently with a global medical company, and, you know, we wanna learn all the time as well. And we went into this client and we spoke to them and we provided an approach. And, actually, during the migration, certain things about the environment came to light that allowed us to actually adapt our approach. So for me, I would also look at following a migration strategy, but also being flexible that if there are newer things that might happen that you learn about the environment opportunities, you have to take those because there are a lot of differentiators out there. And that's differentiators from our side as ECU Slabs. There's differentiators on Nudy's side that had that from a cloud migration perspective and from the hyperscalers themselves. There are things that make a big difference. You know? And we also, as I mentioned earlier, learn about the environment. And we one of the projects or clients that I've dealt with for probably the last seventeen years is a is a bank financial institution. And we were very lucky that we were actually working in the environment before we made the decision to go to Azure. And that really, really allowed us to prepare the environment, to be in a state that we could take it across quite easily, but it also allowed us to start speaking to the people that were the key stakeholders of their side, the network people, the cloud architects, architects, the governance and security offices. Because if you start a project and then all of a sudden you start having those conversations, you can just add three months onto the project because there's a lot of debate and discussion that needs to go around there. And that's just around the architecture and the networking and security. There's a lot of other things. I mean, I'm leaving out the functional requirements and everything like that. So you need to try and understand the environment, and that's something from our perspective that we do look at quite carefully. You know? Yeah. That's things. And so, guys, just to summarize a little bit, what do we hear here? Do we have a plan? I mean, we can have a plan sometimes, and that can also maybe not good enough. Do we have a business case? I think that's important. Put it on paper. Do your typical what if analysis in the sense of it's not just the migration date. So one of the things that will have an insurance issue migration date, It might be that there's different, commercial models that apply once you get to a certain date. It is a journey with options and then making informed. That's my message here. Making informed decisions about your IT landscape. And, yes, sometimes one can just, you know, try to do that much, and they will be still sometimes learning something once we've made the decision, but at least make an informed decision. Want to move back to Ludy, from a cloud operations perspective. Please share with us some of the struggles you experienced with clients. Please also include for me some of the current cross border clients in Botswana and Namibia that have been with APUs for years and how we assisted them in this cloud carrier with place, Burdi. Sure. I think, I think it ties nicely into what Brad has basically said. I think what's really, really important and one of the struggles that we found with a lot of customers is, going to the cloud and depending on what cloud you're going to, it's not the same as running an on premise environment. Your infrastructure design, your management, your monitoring, it's very, very different. Your design from a network perspective is remarkably different. And I think the advice that I would give is rather than trying to go by yourself and then trying to fix it after the fact is going to be very costly, and it's going to be very, very painful. So I think, you know, the message for me is speak to a partner that you can trust, somebody that can go on their journey from the beginning, that can assist you in doing the design correctly from day number one. You know, it is something that we do where we go into customers after the fact and then resolve the problems. But, again, if you do it correctly from the beginning, it's just so much easier and so much more cost effective and way less painful at the end of the day. I think that's one of the major, major drawbacks that I see from a cloud perspective with most customers. As I've mentioned before, you know, we do have a lot of cross border customers, that have hosted with us for quite some time. Again, I think the major challenges that we've had with these customers is around networking and to actually get the networking and security in place, because at the end of the day, you want the performance to be up to par and up to snuff and in place. Absolutely. And, I mean, goes without saying, linking to what Brad said and what Louie just said. We do have worked with bankers, retailers, mining organizations, pharmaceutical organizations to just, name a few. And when we engage with you, we will absolutely and I think that is the benefit of the partner is to share a strategic partner that we believe we are, is to share what we have learned and how we can learn together. So I think sorry. But surely, running out of time. I hope everybody is having still a great time here and that the lines are rising and think, what we are sharing here. But I want to ask, Marita then as our account executive in Namibia, if you have any closing comments to our clients that you engaged with. Thanks, Manliss. Yeah. I think both Rudy and Brad has said it. I'm gonna summarize it for simple for myself and hopefully that will summarize it for everybody else as well. I think there's a lot of, you all at different as is positions. You can think in your mind for your business, what is your to be, and then, you know, the journey. But the journey should be an assessment. I really wanna recommend an assessment phase before you make any decisions because we've seen with other customers that they dive into a tender process and the tenders get pulled back and they try again because they just haven't done the homework and the assessment. Like Brad said, there's no rush. I think really to define your business to be in your mind, like you've identified modernization as one of them, and then make the journey, make assessment part of this journey to get from your current as is to the to be, and whatever you pick to help with assessments. But, obviously, it needs to be somebody with knowledge and experience, and if you use labs, we've done a lot of those. So, yeah. Thanks, Magalice. It was very insightful for me as well, having all the clever guys around you. That is fantastic. And, I think just in closing from my side, thanks everyone today. It's lovely to engage with you. I do want to say this is the first of many conversations, going forward. As I said right from the beginning, the cloud's here to stay. It's not going anywhere. We and, I mean, some of you would know about IT, the heat of it, so the cloud, is that exactly. And then what I really want to say to you is possible to have successful cloud migrations, and that's what we aspire to. So please reach out to Marita, to anybody around the table, myself, Melisse Froblatt, Bradley, Jackson, Ludie, Nell. And you are very welcome to contact us directly. You have our information. We do have our email, and let's just continue the conversations. This is only a forty minute, webinar. It's just the starting point. And in some cases, some of you might say, listen. I know enough now. I'm gonna pause a bit. And that's also good that you say that. But have a lovely, lovely afternoon, and thanks for your time.