TechCentralTechCentral
    Facebook Twitter YouTube LinkedIn
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn YouTube
    TechCentralTechCentral
    NEWSLETTER
    • News

      Rain lashed by Takeover Regulation Panel over Telkom approach

      11 August 2022

      Largest SA telecoms operators launch new industry association

      11 August 2022

      Analysis | Rain muddies the waters with approach to Telkom

      11 August 2022

      Rain wants to merge with Telkom: asks to pitch proposal to board

      11 August 2022

      MTN shares climb on robust Nigeria, SA performance

      11 August 2022
    • World

      Gaming industry’s fortunes fade as pandemic ends

      11 August 2022

      Disney tops Netflix in streaming subscribers

      11 August 2022

      Jumia says it’s past peak losses, shares jump

      10 August 2022

      Elon Musk sells $6.9-billion of Tesla to avoid Twitter fire sale

      10 August 2022

      Nvidia issues profit warning on slump in demand for graphics cards

      8 August 2022
    • In-depth

      African unicorn Flutterwave battles fires on multiple fronts

      11 August 2022

      The length of Earth’s days has been increasing – and no one knows why

      7 August 2022

      As Facebook fades, the Mad Men of advertising stage a comeback

      2 August 2022

      Crypto breaks the rules. That’s the point

      27 July 2022

      E-mail scams are getting chillingly personal

      17 July 2022
    • Podcasts

      Qush on infosec: why prevention is always better than cure

      11 August 2022

      e4’s Adri Führi on encouraging more women into tech careers

      10 August 2022

      How South Africa can woo more women into tech

      4 August 2022

      Book and check-in via WhatsApp? FlySafair is on it

      28 July 2022

      Interview: Why Dell’s next-gen PowerEdge servers change the game

      28 July 2022
    • Opinion

      SIU seeks to set aside R215-million IT tender

      19 July 2022

      No reason South Africa should have a shortage of electricity: Ramaphosa

      11 July 2022

      Ntshavheni’s bias against the private sector

      8 July 2022

      South Africa can no longer rely on Eskom alone

      4 July 2022

      Has South Africa’s advertising industry lost its way?

      21 June 2022
    • Company Hubs
      • 1-grid
      • Altron Document Solutions
      • Amplitude
      • Atvance Intellect
      • Axiz
      • BOATech
      • CallMiner
      • Digital Generation
      • E4
      • ESET
      • Euphoria Telecom
      • IBM
      • Kyocera Document Solutions
      • Microsoft
      • Nutanix
      • One Trust
      • Pinnacle
      • Skybox Security
      • SkyWire
      • Tarsus on Demand
      • Videri Digital
      • Zendesk
    • Sections
      • Banking
      • Broadcasting and Media
      • Cloud computing
      • Consumer electronics
      • Cryptocurrencies
      • Education and skills
      • Energy
      • Fintech
      • Information security
      • Internet and connectivity
      • Internet of Things
      • Investment
      • IT services
      • Motoring and transport
      • Public sector
      • Science
      • Social media
      • Talent and leadership
      • Telecoms
    • Advertise
    TechCentralTechCentral
    Home»Start-ups»Routed sees big opportunity in SA cloud

    Routed sees big opportunity in SA cloud

    Start-ups By Duncan McLeod24 April 2017
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email
    Andrew Cruise

    A Cambridge University-educated mathematician is hoping to shake up South Africa’s cloud computing sector with a new, vendor-neutral cloud platform hosted in Teraco’s fast-expanding data centres.

    Cape Town-born MD Andrew Cruise, who worked early on in his career in investment banking in the UK, hopes the new company, called Routed (pronounced “rooted”), will reshape the cloud services space in South Africa, appealing particularly to corporate customers that have been reluctant so far to shift internal workloads to the cloud.

    Cruise, who was previously cloud engineering manager at a Cape Town-based Internet service provider, co-founded Routed last year with former colleagues Malcolm Siegel and Benjamin Coetzer. Cruise is the controlling shareholder.

    Back in South Africa for the past three years, Cruise said the idea for Routed, which was launched commercially last month, first came to him when he was still in the UK. He said companies had been reluctant to shift their internal workloads to the cloud. Most big cloud vendors, he said, focus on Web-based workloads.

    “The penetration into cloud of internal business workloads is still low,” he said. “In the UK, as the Internet became better quality and commoditised, there was a much bigger push from service providers and customers to move internal workloads into the cloud.”

    When he returned to South Africa, the local market wasn’t ready for this shift, Cruise said. But that has now changed. “There has been massive investment in fibre infrastructure and wireless Internet. We are at the stage now where the market is prepared to take off.”

    The problem is, Internet service providers “don’t really have the right kind of attitude to engage with enterprises or even manage service provider partners”, Cruise said. “There is a demand for cloud infrastructure for internal workloads, but there is a gap in that there isn’t anyone able to deliver that in a really effective way.”

    That’s where the idea of vendor neutrality comes from, he said. “We don’t provide any managed or professional services on top of our cloud infrastructure. Rather, we engage with managed service providers to provide the managed services on top of the infrastructure — they are the people who will ultimately be held accountable for the choice of underlying infrastructure, whether it’s on premise or in the cloud.”

    That means Routed is a channel-first business, but will engage directly with enterprises that don’t outsource their IT to third parties.

    Routed won’t provide Internet infrastructure, working instead with ISPs. “We tell ISPs to keep investing in Internet and fibre. They don’t really want to be investing in enterprise storage and virtualisation, so we encourage them to cross-connect to us. We are not vertically integrated, we are not competing with our channel.”

    Routed’s platform is built on top of VMware technology — specifically vCloud Director stack, which Cruise describes as “battle-hardened” technology. It employs storage from NetApp and compute from Dell and offers a 99,99% uptime service-level promise. “We are comfortable offering that.”

    Its infrastructure is located in Teraco’s Cape Town and Johannesburg data centres. The facilities are not interdependent — if anything happens in one location, it doesn’t affect the other, Cruise said. However, all data is replicated between the data centres as a matter of course.

    The business has been entirely self-funded to date by the founding shareholders. Capital investment is high, though, Cruise conceded. “There’s a reason there isn’t a lot of competition in this market: the high barrier to entry. One barrier is the capital required to invest in this. We are taking a relatively expensive bet on this. But our addressable market is every business in South Africa. Our scale could eventually dwarf the original investment.”

    In fact, Cruise believes the opportunity is vast. He said only 5% of business workloads worldwide have moved to hyperscale cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft. He said these cloud providers offer highly commoditised services, and businesses often prefer to deal with cloud platforms that can provide more tailored services.

    “A VMware-type cloud is targeted at enterprises and business. I don’t see that we are competing necessarily against those hyperscale providers, because of our approach and our attitude,” he said.

    He added that the founding shareholders in Routed are highly experienced, and this will stand them in good stead. “This is not our first rodeo by any means. My colleagues Malcolm and Benjamin have decades of experience in providing network and cloud infrastructure.”  — © 2017 NewsCentral Media

    Amazon Benjamin Coetzer Malcolm Siegel Microsoft Routed Teraco VMware
    Share. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email
    Previous ArticleCyril takes the gloves off
    Next Article Lyft drivers sue Uber over ‘spyware’

    Related Posts

    Gaming industry’s fortunes fade as pandemic ends

    11 August 2022

    Jumia says it’s past peak losses, shares jump

    10 August 2022

    The African tech start-ups eyeing global markets

    8 August 2022
    Add A Comment

    Comments are closed.

    Promoted

    Pricing Beyond CMYK: printers answer the FAQs

    11 August 2022

    How secure is your cloud?

    10 August 2022

    5 ways to make attack-path management more manageable

    10 August 2022
    Opinion

    SIU seeks to set aside R215-million IT tender

    19 July 2022

    No reason South Africa should have a shortage of electricity: Ramaphosa

    11 July 2022

    Ntshavheni’s bias against the private sector

    8 July 2022

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the best South African technology news and analysis delivered to your e-mail inbox every morning.

    © 2009 - 2022 NewsCentral Media

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.