MakwaIT Drives Customer Impact Through Disruptive Innovation

Overview

Challenge

• MakwaIT is committed to delivering innovative AI and edge solutions that empower African enterprises to accelerate digital transformation. To achieve this, MakwaIT needed a partner with both enterprise-grade customer solutions - ensuring security, compliance, and scalability for its clients.

Solution

• Partnering with Hitachi Vantara enables MakwaIT to deliver end-to-end, sustainable solutions, backed by Hitachi’s 100% Data Availability Guarantee.

Outcome

• With proven technology, competitive pricing, and responsive support, MakwaIT is positioned to disrupt the market, expand access to innovation, and drive business growth across Africa and beyond.

Challenge

MakwaIT is a South African-born, 100% black-youth-owned digital technology company focused on driving digital transformation across the public and private sectors. The company delivers innovative technology solutions to clients across Africa, the UAE, and the USA.

Rishi Birbal, Chief Strategy and Partnerships Officer at MakwaIT, says, “The next five years will be transformative for MakwaIT. We’ve embarked on a fast-paced business growth strategy, which will position us to bring the next generation of edge and AI solutions to enterprises across Africa and beyond.”

To realize its vision, MakwaIT aimed to complement its deep expertise in networking solutions with enterprise-grade Hitachi solutions. The goal is to offer customers a comprehensive end-to-end solution, which is vital for delivering edge and AI workloads in untapped markets.

“The ability to provide secure, high-performance, and scalable storage is crucial across industries, particularly in highly regulated sectors such as banking, government, and healthcare,” explains Birbal. “To help us design future-ready hybrid cloud solutions for the widest possible range of customer use cases, we looked to partner with an enterprise leader.”

Solution

To drive growth across Africa and around the world, MakwaIT has forged a strategic partnership with Hitachi Vantara. By combining Hitachi storage solutions with Cisco networking technologies, MakwaIT identified a powerful opportunity to simplify hybrid cloud management and accelerate digital transformation for its clients.

Birbal comments, “When we looked at the storage marketplace, Hitachi stood out as the prime fit for MakwaIT. Hitachi has a long-standing alliance with Cisco, one of our other key technology partners - and both organizations offer integrated hybrid cloud solutions designed for low-latency, high availability, and environmental sustainability.”

Paul Le Roux, Executive for Strategic Partnerships at MakwaIT, adds, “When we review analyst reports, Hitachi Vantara consistently leads the pack.  The completeness of its vision and proven ability to execute were key factors in our decision. Just as importantly, Hitachi has built a strong partner ecosystem - with comprehensive technology integrations that make our go-to-market proposition far more compelling.”

Outcome

Looking ahead, MakwaIT sees that its collaboration with Hitachi will help it to take the lead as enterprise demand for AI, edge, and hybrid cloud solutions takes off.

“Data is at the heart of our value proposition to customers. Whether we’re delivering an Internet of Things solution for the mining industry or implementing an agentic AI platform for a healthcare provider,” says Birbal. “For that reason, we greatly value Hitachi’s 100% Data Availability Guarantee. When we deploy a Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One solution, we have complete faith that sensitive customer data will be safe and secure.”

As the new partnership takes shape, experts from Hitachi Vantara will work closely with MakwaIT throughout the customer's lifecycle. From identifying and developing new opportunities to providing implementation and integration services and post-deployment support.

“Strategic partnerships, with a focus on sustainability, will be a key enabler of our long-term business goals,” says Birbal. “Teaming up with global leaders like Hitachi Vantara and Cisco empowers us to deliver high-quality solutions that meet the evolving demands of our customers.”

MakwaIT sees that the combination of high-end technology, competitive pricing, responsive support and a focus on sustainable, scalable solutions from Hitachi will help it disrupt its target markets.

Birbal concludes, “In Hitachi, we’ve found a partner that shares our customer-centric philosophy. Their team is always ready to do whatever it takes to solve customer challenges.  As we accelerate our growth strategy, we’re excited to work with Hitachi to expand our go-to-market capabilities and bring the benefits of AI and edge computing to untapped markets.”