Nick Durrant, Bluegrass Digital CEO
More and more companies are using Azure to build applications faster and are also now using smarter tools to manage performance. Microsoft Azure offers the best cloud platform, designed for developers to build the most innovative apps.
It offers many different options for app development in the cloud. This is the second wave of cloud computing - where companies like Bluegrass focus on delivering the innovation their customers demand, not the infrastructure required to run them.
Bluegrass Digital is a specialist web and mobile software development company helping companies deliver digital transformation in their business. The company also boasts Microsoft competencies in Azure Cloud Platform and Azure Application Development.
Nick Durrant, Bluegrass Digital CEO, believes there are significant savings for customers moving to Azure. “We run applications across Azure, AWS and Google Cloud, but over the past few years we decided to focus more on building competency in Azure given our Microsoft partnership.”
With the new Azure data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town, Microsoft can now deliver all the benefits of the cloud to a local South African market at local pricing. Azure is fast in terms of deployment, operation, and scalability.
Bluegrass provides its clients with skills and support in managing their applications using its ‘Business as usual’ model. This gives the competitive advantage for the companies to adopt Azure. Being the most up to date cloud technology, the infrastructure and applications could be made agile.
“We have also invested heavily in educating our team on Azure. This year alone, we have already been involved in many migrations to Azure. We help our clients drive business growth through data-led user experiences, innovation and technology built to scale,” he explains.
With Azure, companies can now modernise their applications with the flexibility of the cloud and with low latency and the power of these data centres, they can consider things like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning.
“More recently we partnered with Clover SA to redesign and re-platform many of their B2B and B2C websites from the ground up. We consolidated their corporate and brand digital assets onto a single technology stack and migrated all their websites to the cloud on Microsoft Azure,” he says.
Durrant says there’s definitely much more maturity in the UK and US markets. “For South Africa, there are reasons for that. Locally we’ve had problems with latency, connectivity, the basic geography. Data sovereignty has been an issue. There’s been a lack of trust, from the CIO’s perspective.”
Azure helps companies transform and reduce costs with an energy-efficient infrastructure spanning more than 100 highly secure facilities worldwide, linked by one of the largest networks on earth.
"Reduce the cost, the time, and the complexity of operating a global infrastructure while meeting your local data residency needs. Azure lets you deliver services at the scale you need to reach your customers and partners, wherever they are," he concludes.
