Mindware, one of the leading regional IT Value-Added Distributors in Middle East and Africa, has announced the launch of its Cloud Marketplace in Ivory Coast to serve the sub Saharan Africain countries. 
The Mindware Marketplace will enhance Cloud adoption by providing the channel community with an exceptional transactional experience, along with an extensive range of Cloud solutions and services.
Clients and partners in Ivory Coast and neighboring countries can now take advantage of the Marketplace for purchases in Central African CFA franc currency.
Mindware’s objective is to be the ‘Cloud Distributor of Choice’, aggregating multiple Cloud solutions and helping partners create and commercialize subscription-based Cloud and Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) solutions.
Mr. Silmi Khanfir, Director of Cloud at Mindware comments: “We are excited to launch the Mindware’s Cloud Marketplace in our sub Saharan Africain Hub, Ivory Coast, to offer our partners a range of aggregated Cloud solutions from various hyperscalers, private cloud providers, and ISVs, in addition to our Cloud professional and support services. This approach helps partners and their clients with their digital transformation journey and enables them to cross-sell and up-sell, with the convenience of pricing and billing being in local currency. The Marketplace provides a smooth user experience, and the platform’s API integrations automate the subscription and consumption management required for high-volume Cloud and XaaS business.”
The launch is a part of Mindware’s Cloud related geo expansion strategy in Africa, keeping in mind the positive growth expectations in Ivory Coast and West Africa in general.
The Marketplace will, in addition to making Cloud services purchase easy and intuitive, offer partners the ability to set up and manage their own “white labeled storefront”, thereby offering Cloud solutions directly to end-customers. It will allow partners to deliver Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings via the platform. The interface is intuitive and helps partners to place orders faster and it offers recommendations when products are being purchased to provide an optimized solution.
With the inclusion of Ivory Coast, the Cloud Marketplace has expanded its reach to a total of ten countries, encompassing the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia. Currently, there are over 500 transacting partners within this network.
“In the last 3 years, we witnessed an accelerated shift from the traditional on-premise and perpetual licensing model to the subscription model, leading to a significant increase in the deployment of online marketplaces. This transformation is being driven by two key factors. Firstly, customers and resellers are demanding a better user experience when purchasing vendor solutions. Secondly, vendors are increasingly moving towards XaaS, Cloud consumption-based, and subscription models. These trends have created a need for marketplaces that offer improved user experiences, automated ordering, invoicing, and billing processes, as well as insights into purchased solutions and consumed services,” concluded Khanfir.
