Africa Cloud Wars!!

Sw7 analysed the size of the sub-Saharan cloud skills market to understand which direction each market would move in their shift to the cloud, at what pace and what impact this would have on the startup or Digital Native markets.

The data needs to be refreshed but the ratios are likely to remain the same.

• Markets will move to the cloud at the pace they are able based on the available skills
• South Africa has more cloud skills than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa combined
• 60% of the skills are in Gauteng
• 30% of the skills are in the Western Cape, this market is roughly the same size as Nigeria

There are two cloud markets

• Lift and Shift - Customers porting existing loads over to the cloud with existing vendors. SAP, Oracle, Azure lead this space although the shift to multi-cloud for larger accounts will mean these positions are shifting
• Digital Natives - Businesses launching new cloud products "outside the firewall". Data suggest AWS serves about 70% of this market.
• We chose node.js as our lead indicator for Digital Natives. Digital Natives often leverage node.js and then move to AWS as they scale

It's currently a two-horse race, the South African Azure and AWS data centres have created significant local momentum. We expect the Google numbers to start lifting this year with a strong inflexion point next year. The combination of connectivity through their own undersea cables to the new South African data centres will create a uniquely African offering.

Sw7 created the dataset to understand how large our core market, Digital Natives, was, and where the innovation nodes are likely to be. The skills are a lead indicator for the sub-Saharan African startup markets. The current VC investment figures show that South Africa is currently third or fourth in VC investment. The above dataset shows there is a heavy investment bias in these numbers and does not take into account the underlying skills base we have in South Africa. South Africa is and is likely to remain, the cloud powerhouse in sub-Saharan Africa. This will lead us to a leadership position in startup markets.