This is part of an ongoing global expansion program for the company that has already seen them extend their European and US operations into SE Asia and Latin America.
The practice will focus initially on the South African market, where cloud adoption is anticipated to accelerate sharply during the rest of 2014 and beyond.
Giles Sirett, CEO of ShapeBlue commented: “We are seeing a sharp increase in demand for our services relating to Apache CloudStack and Citrix CloudPlatform, driven by service providers building in-country public clouds and ongoing enterprise adoption of private & hybrid cloud compute models. South Africa is an exciting opportunity for us to bring our services to emerging opportunities across sub Saharan Africa.”
Dan Crowe, Managing Consultant for the new practice added: “South Africa is catching up with more mature cloud markets rapidly, and we believe what we’ve learnt about building clouds over the past three years, and using our CSForge rapid deployment framework, we can help accelerate time to value for South African businesses evolving cloud adoption strategies” Sirett continued: “Today, CloudStack technologies are under represented in southern Africa, but with Apache CloudStack and Citrix CloudPlatform proving the most stable and proven cloud management system we expect usage across the continent to increase exponentially.”
The new practice in South Africa will be based in Cape Town and will give ShapeBlue both consulting and sales functions in the region. Crowe concludes: “We are also delighted to announce details of a launch event to be held jointly in Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively on Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th July where we, along with Citrix and Trend Micro will discuss adoption trends and cloud computing models in a South African context. We look forward to meeting with many interested parties there.
