Liquid Telecom to become a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute partner for Africa
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Liquid Telecom to become a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute partner for Africa

Liquid Telecom, a subsidiary of Econet, will become a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute partner across Africa when Microsoft Azure becomes generally available in 2018.

Using its CloudConnect service, Liquid Telecom will be offering direct connections to Microsoft’s South African ExpressRoute locations enabling businesses of all sizes in Africa to have private access to Azure. 

Commenting on the announcement, Nic Rudnick, Group CEO of Liquid Telecom, said: “The arrival of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform in South Africa is a statement to the world on how far Africa’s cloud ecosystem has come. We are delighted to be able to offer enterprise customers fast and reliable connections to the Azure platform through a local connection to their nearest Liquid Telecom CloudConnect node.” 

To support access to Azure services, Liquid Telecom is adding CloudConnect nodes to over 25 points of presence (PoPs) across Africa, and is also making major upgrades to Liquid Telecom data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town. 

CloudConnect for Azure ExpressRoute will allow customers to create SLA based connections between Azure data centres and infrastructure on their premises or in a colocation environment.  

Liquid Telecom is already taking pre-orders from some of the region’s largest enterprises for CloudConnect and this forms part of Liquid Telecom’s strategy to become an integrated fibre network, data centre, content and digital services provider. 

“Liquid Telecom’s extensive fibre footprint across Africa provides support for the upcoming launch of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform in South Africa. With scale and reach across Sub-Saharan Africa, Liquid Telecom will increase Azure ExpressRoute availability across the region and help deliver Azure to more enterprise customers,” said Ross Ortega, Microsoft Azure, networking product management at Microsoft Corp.  

Angola Cables recently became a Microsoft ExpressRoute partner, enabling it to meet the needs of African organisations migrating business applications and IT infrastructure to the cloud.

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