Company Announcement - Systems integrator XON, with its major shareholder NEC, and Wingu, a wholly-owned subsidiary of XON, will host an event for tertiary educational institutions, sponsored by Intel, on March 8 2016, to promote the benefits of cloud-based services and technology, tailored for education institutions.
 
Chief benefits of the cloud technology offering include highly predictable costs, capex-free infrastructure and centrally managed, hosted services. These services are co-located at vendor-neutral data centres, with low latency services delivered via local Internet providers and the NAPAfrica peering point. Cloud services are delivered on a consumption basis with sub-hourly increments.  Billing information is viewable online and all services are charged in local currency. The associated low cost, white label model enables students to pay by Bitcoin, EFT, debit or credit card. The tertiary institutions themselves benefit from bulk pricing negotiated via TENET, with the aim of assisting these institutions to move from a capex-intensive IT model, to a more efficient opex model, on a pay-as-you-grow basis.
 
“Educational institutions, particularly higher education facilities, often require computing resources and services to facilitate education,” says Thomas Lee, GM of Wingu. “Students also require the same for assignments, so we’ve piloted services we offer in conjunction with TENET (Tertiary Education and Research Network of South Africa) to demonstrate our low latency, low cost platform. The response has been extremely favourable. In addition, the model enables tertiary institutions to provide students services at low cost, without the capex layouts and ongoing overheads that go along with owning your own infrastructure, particularly in unpredictable demand environments.”
 
The one-day event takes place at Emperor’s Palace, close to the OR Tambo airport. The format is a light breakfast, presentations and demonstrations, lunch, afternoon presentations and demonstrations, followed by cocktails and a chance to network with representatives from the vendors, educational institutions, and sponsor Intel. There will be a lucky draw and all interested, associated educational representatives are welcome to attend by contacting sonja@wingu.co.za
 
TENET provides Internet and information technology services to South African universities, Further Education and Training colleges and associated research and support institutions. SANReN is part of a comprehensive South African government approach to a National Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System to ensure successful participation of South African researchers and scientists in the global knowledge production effort.
 
“TENET, provides connectivity to tertiary institutions and they connect through anywhere from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps links, into the same data centre and peering point Wingu is linked to. That overcomes one of the major problems education institutions face when buying cloud services from companies offshore, which is high latencies. Another is that offshore services, although offered in rands, are linked to US dollar rates that change with the fluctuating exchange rate and, as recently evidenced, become progressively more expensive,” says Lee.
 
Lee adds that institutions have also expressed their desire to offer the same cost-effective services on to students as white label products, essentially extending the same services but branded by the institution.
 
One of the major draw cards for educational institutions, and one of the reasons why Wingu can contain costs, is because the service is based on OpenStack, which is an open source platform already very popular at worldwide educational facilities. “It’s open source, which means open APIs (application programming interfaces), and that enables educational facilities to automate services which they cannot necessarily do on other platforms,” says Lee. The Wingu cloud platform is an Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud, so customers can use us with confidence knowing that our system is designed and supported by the largest player in the OpenStack industry.