Sylvester Samuel, chief executive of Gijima Holdings SA
South African-owned leading information communications technology (ICT) provider and systems integrator Gijima recently scooped the prestigious Huawei IT Partner of the Year award in Dubai.
The award not only recognises Gijima as a capable player in the ICT sector but also highlights the partnership between Gijima and Huawei which has, in part, made this award possible for Gijima.
Huawei’s annual Partner of the Year award recognises exceptional performance among its partners.
Chen Wei, director of solution sales and marketing for Huawei SA said Huawei looks for three qualities in a Huawei IT Partner of the Year.
The first is a company that is able to jointly develop or make breakthroughs in key businesses with Huawei in the IT field. Secondly, the company must have been in long-term co-operation with Huawei to form strategic partnerships in the South African ecosystem, with strong integration capabilities in the IT field. Third, and most important, the company’s partnership with Huawei must play a key role in South Africa’s IT digital transformation.
The Huawei-Gijima partnership is one of Huawei’s longstanding partnerships in South Africa and spans over a decade.
Speaking about the achievement, Sylvester Samuel, chief executive of Gijima Holdings SA, said it is very special to be the recipient of such a prestigious award and especially from a company such as Huawei, which has invested into local skills over the past decade.
Wei said Gijima stood out from its competitors to ultimately be recognised with this accolade, because it has long-term focus on the IT field and implements the Cloud First strategic direction, which is in line with Huawei’s own strategic direction.
“Having a partner who shares the same strategic direction as Huawei proves to bring great value to South Africa,” Wei said.
Gijima is South Africa’s largest black-owned and level one broad-based black economic empowerment ICT provider that is positioning itself to be a giant African ICT provider.
Commenting on the challenges faced by Gijima as a black-owned ICT provider trying to carve space for itself in the industry, Samuel explained that the ICT industry has been challenging over the past two years, especially with the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Now as we are exiting the Covid-19 pandemic we are finding that it is extremely difficult to get our space in the industry, but being 100% black owned we are focusing on developing skills locally.
“We are focusing on local innovation and the partnership with Huawei just takes us to a new level. It adds so much value to a company of Gijima’s stature,” Samuel said.
Wei said when Huawei chose to partner with Gijima all those years ago, recognising that it is a 100% black owned company, it was because Huawei recognised and supported B-BEE as an imperative, bringing together diverse skills to add value, thereby ensuring the holistic growth and invigoration of its businesses.
Samuel described the Huawei-Gijima partnership as a “fusion of Chinese and South African culture” saying that because of the partnership, collaboration to bring local innovation to customers in South Africa has been made possible. “We focus on understanding each other and we focus on understanding the market and developing South Africa as a joint partnership.”
Gijima winning the Huawei IT Partner of the Year award does not signal the end of the road, as the parties have both expressed the intention to remain in partnership and climb to greater heights together.
Wei said Huawei wants to establish a long-term, strategic, unshakable partnership with Gijima and to continue building a solid local joint brand that continuously creates value for customers.
“We further want to consolidate co-operation in the IT field and develop multi-field and multi-industry ICT infrastructure construction plans in South Africa,” Wei said.
Samuel said future plans for Gijima’s partnership with Huawei include growing revenue and market share, together with Huawei.
“We want to focus on the strategy within the innovation topics of the ICT solution such as safe and smart cities and have a greater focus on cloud.
“We want to focus on building an enterprise business with Huawei so that we are able to have a converged platform for government and local private customers,” Samuel said.