AWS Africa

Zailab is a cloud-based contact center platform to simplify the complex process of setting up and managing contact centers. To support its performance, Zailab chose to go all-in on AWS.

Gap Draught uses AWS for a more reliable, scalable infrastructure that makes it easier to grow internationally. The company provides technology that helps bars manage stock better and bill more of what they pour. Its sensors in customers’ beer lines send data to Amazon EC2 instances for processing.

Absa uses AWS to help deliver it's aims to which by 2020, had launched more than 100 initiatives on the AWS Cloud.

Flutterwave leverage AWS by cutting time for onboarding customers by 60 percent.

Khwela used AWS to develop and launch its new mobile taxi app, giving thousands of South African commuters a better experience with the use of AWS Activate, growing the company 80 percent since launch.

DataProphet uses AWS to help manufacturers reduce scrap rates to zero.

TymeBank, the first bank in South Africa to receive a full banking license in almost 20 years, migrated 85 percent of its infrastructure to AWS using Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.

OneFi provides loans to customers throughout Africa. To support its growth plans and compliance requirements, OneFi chose to go all-in on AWS.

Cellulant Powers Digital Payments Across Africa with AWS.

Sensor Networks builds predictive models using AWS IoT and machine learning.

WesBank uses AWS to deliver a smooth customer experience.

Jembi leverages AWS Training to Improve Healthcare Information Exchange in Africa

JUMO chooses AWS to enable faster, more cost-effective access to digital financial services.

Mix Telematics increases productivity with AWS.

Rhino Africa Relies on AWS to Provide Unique African Holiday Experiences.

Aella Credit uses AWS to improve identity verification and grow its business.

Custos Media Technologies scales globally with AWS.

NewGlobe (best known for its well known Bridge community school programmes) provides bespoke lesson guides, based on national curriculums, for hundreds of thousands of teachers in transformation programmes across Africa and Asia. Every day, the social enterprise reaches 1,000,000 nursery and primary school children living in extreme poverty. It's technology platform is designed to work in low infrastructure environments and makes previously opaque classrooms and school systems, transparent and accountable. The organization has hosted most of its digital services on AWS since 2014, when it started to scale at speed, supporting a growing number of teachers and serving more and more students each year. NewGlobe stores all of its teacher lesson guides, teacher identification information, pupil records, and student test results in Amazon S3 where the files are easily accessed by the academic team, who regularly analyze how children are performing in order to further improve learning outcomes. In 2018, NewGlobe adopted a serverless architecture to reduce infrastructure costs and keep costs low for its government partners and parent customers.

"By using AWS, we have increased the speed and reliability of our technology platform, which allows us to move more quickly to support new opportunities and grow seamlessly,” said Kent McNeil, CTO at NewGlobe. “It also allows us to focus our time and energy on helping children learn, rather than on managing and maintaining infrastructure.”

Rwanda & Nigeria-based Ogelle, a company of Reddot Television Network Limited, is an online platform for African entertainment such as films, music, and comedy, as well as lifestyle blogging on tourism, cuisine, vocation, and more. The company uses AWS Elemental MediaConvert for transcoding videos.

“We selected AWS Elemental MediaConvert because as a startup, we needed a solution that was cost-effective and would allow us to spend our resources on promoting the content, not running it,” said Osita Oparaugo, Founder of Ogelle. “With AWS, we can convert VOD content at a scale but at a fee that fits into our budget and lets us pay as we go. It also gives us cost projections and allows us to scale as needed, which is exactly what we need.”

RecoMed is South Africa’s largest online healthcare booking platform that connects over 150,000 patients and 2,000 healthcare providers every month. The company uses Amazon EC2 for both frontend and backend services, utilizing multiple availability zones and auto scaling groups. Using Amazon EC2, the company can easily manage peak loads on its system, even during the busiest booking times.

“I’ve been using Amazon EC2 for almost 10 years and I can’t imagine having to request hardware upgrades or new machines in a physical data center in order to scale,” said Tasleem Williams, COO at RecoMed. “Moving to AWS has simplified our operations and given us full, granular control over our architecture with just a click.”

Sentian is a smart security hub that integrates existing alarm, CCTV, and automation systems into one control application to allow them all to work together to solve problems they cannot solve individually. Sentian sends users a 12-second video clip showing exactly what triggered the alarm. Users can respond by pushing the panic button, opening the gate, turning on the lights, disarming the alarm, or bypassing a sensor, all while monitoring the situation from the camera that triggered the action. The company has hosted the REST APIs behind its core application on AWS since 2013. In 2017, Sentian adopted a serverless architecture using AWS Lambda to index content in Amazon S3 and transfer flat analytic files into a relational database. Since configuring the setup, the company has not needed to invest any time into maintenance.

“In the beginning, Amazon EC2 helped us develop the prototype and take the product to market quickly. As time went by, it helped us iterate on it and continue to innovate,” said Trevor, [CTO] at Sentian. “With AWS Lambda, we can focus on innovating even more because we don’t have to worry about procuring infrastructure. We simply let it run while our developers concentrate on building products instead."

Cameroon-based NEXAH specialises in developing web, mobile, and entertainment services for the African. Its main offerings are mobile gaming and health platforms, an SMS search engine, and a bulk SMS platform. Joseph Njel Nguidjol, CEO NEXAH, explains: “Start-ups in Africa find it difficult to build a world-class IT infrastructure.” To overcome this hurdle, NEXAH chose AWS as the foundation to build its own architecture at an acceptable cost. The main services NEXAH implemented include Amazon EC2, AWS Relational Database Service, Amazon S3, AWS DevOps Tools, AWS Virtual Private Cloud, AWS AutoScaling, AWS Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Cloud Formation, and AWS Lambda, among others.

“Leveraging AWS enables us to reduce our costs so we can enter the market with better products than our competitors at a good price,” said Nguidjol. “This is motivating our teams to strive to do their best, which is paying dividends to our bottom line.”