Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 30 | Page 10

NEWS GBI pioneers SD-WAN in Middle East and Africa with Nuage Networks African companies come out on top at 2019 Epicor Customer Excellence Awards T wo African companies have been recognised at the 2019 Epicor Customer Excellence Awards. South Africa based, Nature’s Choice, was the Business Transformation winner for clearly demonstrating best-in-class business transformation and measurable business value from its Epicor ERP implementation, while Sonamet took home the prize in the Technology Innovator category. The Angola-based organisation was selected for demonstrating how it has used technology to drive innovation throughout the business to achieve measurable success. Gulf Bridge International is to use the Nuage Networks SD-WAN 2.0 solution N okia has announced that inter- connect carrier Gulf Bridge International (GBI) will use the Nuage Networks SD-WAN 2.0 solution to offer their enterprise customers optimised connectivity between branches and private and public clouds. dynamic responses to security threats such as distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) and the ability to monitor capacity and distribute it manually or automatically in order to meet the bandwidth needs of individual branches or data centres. The deal marks the first extension of a software-defined wide area network (SD- WAN) to the public cloud in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region. Cengiz Oztelcan, CEO of GBI, said: “We believe Nuage’s SD-WAN solution will completely change the future of business connectivity services for our enterprise customers. As the largest provider of connectivity in our market, we see SD-WAN as the icing on the cake that will further reinforce the confidence, loyalty and trust of our many business customers. With GBI products and the SD-WAN technology, we are delivering more capabilities and bringing more value to our customers.” GBI provides managed IP services to hundreds of enterprise customers in Europe, Middle East and Africa and Asia. With this new solution, GBI’s customers can set up automated services with specific policies related to availability, reliability or security, via one, unified interface. This includes 10 INTELLIGENTCIO “The MENA region has seen a significant shift in priorities in the last few years, moving from an oil economy to a knowledge economy, resulting in opportunities for enterprises to reinvent themselves in the cloud,” said Andy Coussins, Senior Vice President and head of Epicor International. “As industries across the region continue to expand, Epicor is focused on enabling growth by bringing the best in industry-specific digital solutions to our customers here.” The awards was held at Epicor’s annual MENA Customer Summit that concentrated on how the cloud can enable enterprises to reinvent themselves amid the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The event provided regional businesses the opportunity to network with Epicor customers from across the manufacturing, distribution and hospitality industries, with experts sharing key insights, trends and updates, focusing on the Epicor ERP and Epicor iScala solutions. www.intelligentcio.com