Reinforcing its commitment to South Africa, Oracle has announced the opening of an Innovation Hub in Johannesburg, a first for the company in Africa that will help drive the adoption of emerging technologies across the country’s corporates, public sector and academia.
In line with South Africa’s National Development Plan (NDP) 2030, Oracle’s Innovation Hub is aimed at furthering Digital Transformation in the country by raising awareness about the impact of emerging technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Bots and Machine Learning (ML) to help drive economic growth and support the delivery of innovative and transparent services to citizens and customers.
The new hub will act as a platform for Oracle customers, partners and other stakeholders to better understand the potential of emerging technologies and co-create industry specific innovations with top Oracle experts.
“There is now widespread recognition that a digital revolution is an imperative for South Africa’s socio economic growth; including by the Honourable President Cyril Ramaphosa”, said Niral Patel, Managing Director and Technology Leader, Oracle South Africa.
“As a leading cloud solutions company, we are focused on supporting South Africa’s public and private sector drive impactful transformation with latest digital technologies. Oracle’s new innovation hub in Johannesburg will act as a catalyst to help drive awareness, experimentation and implementation of transformational initiatives that will be customised to address local challenges and create new opportunities.”
Derek Bose, Senior Applications Directors for South Africa and the SADC regional cluster at Oracle, added: “Forrester predicts that businesses that leverage Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and IoT to uncover new business insights will outperform less informed peers by US$1.2 trillion per annum by 2020. Oracle research also shows an increasing interest in Artificial Intelligence capabilities, with nearly a third (29%) of cloud users citing the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence as a key requirement of cloud.
“However, making Artificial Intelligence easy to adopt is critical – a key challenge for organisations is that they can’t afford to wait. The Oracle Innovation Hub will aim to address this challenge by engaging with key South African audiences by raising their awareness levels, helping drive an innovative approach and supporting the skills development of next generation of African leaders.”
Oracle’s Innovation Hub is based at the company´s Johannesburg office and will relocate to the new state of the art Oracle building that is currently being built and expected to be ready mid- 2019.
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