Datacentrix, a provider of high-performing and secure ICT solutions, has achieved a global milestone by providing BankservAfrica, an automated clearing-house located in Johannesburg, with the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) NonStop solution, making Datacentrix the first channel supplier of HPE NonStop locally. Factors that influenced the decision involved the non-negotiable requirements for always-available transactions and the dire need to close the southern African ICT skills gap. <\/p>\n
BankservAfrica operates both nationally and within the greater African continent. The company, which is responsible for annually processing billions of transactions valued at trillions of South African rands, is also advocating for local ICT skills in its bid to deliver outstanding services to its direct clients, including banks, corporates, government and the retail sector, as well as the end customers of these sectors. <\/p>\n
\u201cAs Africa\u2019s largest automated clearing house, for over four decades, BankservAfrica has played a crucial role in enabling simplicity in the payments industry, processing billions of trusted payment transactions per year, all the while maintaining the safety and security of South Africa\u2019s National Payment System (NPS),\u201d states Hamman Ferreira, CTO at BankservAfrica. <\/p>\n
\u201cAs you can imagine, with the company\u2019s long history comes aged IT legacy systems. There is a pressing and crucial need to seamlessly service customers in the digital era, and so our strategy is to invest in technology that offers a proven non-stop, highly available and robust service to make digitalisation a reality.\u201d <\/p>\n
Appreciating that its role is quickly changing from a traditional transaction-clearing house to that of a fintech company servicing various channels of banking, BankservAfrica chose to deploy the HPE NonStop system. <\/p>\n
The system is designed from the ground up for mission-critical environments that demand continuous business and 100% fault tolerance. The proven solution eliminates the risk of downtime while meeting large-scale business needs, online transaction processing and database requirements. In addition, the NonStop software environment is now available for use in private clouds. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe certainly realise that transactions are not only our lifeblood, but also the lifeblood of the end customer,\u201d notes Ferreira. \u201cThis is why our focus is on both established and innovative technologies that facilitate always-available banking throughout Africa \u2013 today and in the future.\u201d <\/p>\n
What makes the latest technology provisioning unique in South Africa is that, for the first time, it was not supplied directly by HPE \u2013 as is the norm \u2013 but through its Platinum partner, Datacentrix. <\/p>\n
Especially noteworthy is that switching from the traditional HPE contract to Datacentrix has boosted the path to building a greater local support structure and user group, and to growing a NonStop community in southern Africa and into Africa \u2013 increasing the demand for NonStop skills throughout the region. \u201cOur function is to service the greater African community. Considering our ageing workforce, by educating and certifying local people in specialised IT roles, we are not only ensuring our future, but the future of Africa\u2019s youth,\u201d adds Ferreira. <\/p>\n
Creating local ICT skills is a subject about which Ferreira is passionate, stressing: \u201cOur job as leaders is to develop expertise locally\u201d. He has therefore personally taken on the responsibility of promoting a regional HP NonStop community, influencing South Africa\u2019s financial giants to take the same route and join hands in creating a bigger demand for home-grown, specialised ICT skills. <\/p>\n
The relationship with Datacentrix, strengthened through this installation, has also been met with high praise. \u201cThe commercial relationship between BankservAfrica and Datacentrix has been a good one since our first contract almost 10 years ago,\u201d notes Emile Burger, Group COO at BankservAfrica. \u201cAs a services business, Datacentrix has great people with an excellent skill set and a good heart. This, together with world-class knowledge and services as well as best-of-breed technology, makes Datacentrix a strategic partner of choice. The company has an always available and easy to access escalation path, which has resulted in it being highly responsive in meeting our needs \u2013 from service to technical to cost. Added to this is that Datacentrix operates in both a tactical and an honourable fashion, which assists us in ensuring that our chosen solutions are sustainable.\u201d <\/p>\n
Ferreira further highlights that moving BankservAfrica from legacy systems into the digital era is firmly entrenched in attaining the IT division\u2019s three strategic business outcomes: resilience, reliability and responsiveness. He says: \u201cTechnology goes hand in hand with people. Our employees are on this journey with us and we do not move faster than the entire team \u2013 this ensures that new technology is adopted through thorough exposure, training and understanding. This has been especially important in our migration to innovative architecture. The literal bottom line is that our customers simply can\u2019t afford our downtime \u2013 it\u2019s like changing a plane\u2019s engine whilst it\u2019s in flight.\u201d <\/p>\n
This strategy has seen BankservAfrica become a leader in effectively adopting powerful technology that serves Africa\u2019s diverse payment systems \u2013 from large traditional financial institutions to the mobile wallet and further mobile payment apps. The company is presently only one of three companies worldwide to achieve this interoperability. <\/p>\n
\u201cOur vision for the future connects the economy with furthering local ICT skills. We are fortunate to have select partners, such as Datacentrix, to help us achieve this goal. At BankservAfrica we firmly believe that empowerment, robust technology and extensive local partnerships investments will enable a stronger economy throughout Africa. Trust here is key, people need to believe in it,\u201d says Ferreira. <\/p>\n
\u201cDatacentrix consistently aims to deliver a dependable, always-available service that perfectly matches our robust, complete and flexible ICT infrastructure solutions offering,\u201d adds Justin Hammann, Account Manager at Datacentrix. \u201cOur decade-long partnership with BankservAfrica has provided us with an in-depth view into its business strategy. This insight has enabled us to offer them a holistic value proposition that successfully equips the company to integrate innovative technology, safeguarding their objectives to deliver an always-on answer that meets the success of their digital business model and delivers the peace of mind that their end customers require.\u201d \t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Datacentrix, a provider of high-performing and secure ICT solutions, has achieved a global milestone by providing BankservAfrica, an automated clearing-house located in Johannesburg, with the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) NonStop solution, making Datacentrix the first channel supplier of HPE NonStop locally. Factors that influenced the decision involved the non-negotiable requirements for always-available transactions and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":14344,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[565,34,399,19,183],"tags":[385,1625,597,679,1929,1930,210,453],"class_list":["post-14343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-banking-finance","category-case-studies","category-more-news","category-regional-news","category-software","tag-africa","tag-bankservafrica","tag-datacentrix","tag-fintech","tag-hpe-nonstop-system","tag-operating-system","tag-software-2","tag-south-africa"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}