IT services provider HCL Technologies Ltd (HCL) has aligned with Cisco to announce the opening of a South Africa Glocal Centre of Excellence (GCoE) in Johannesburg.

This will serve as a local support centre for HCL and Cisco’s South African clients. It will also train local engineers on advanced Cisco technologies to support clients across Africa and specifically South Africa.

HCL has already established Global Cisco Hub in India. The new GCoE, which will be operated by HCL, will be aligned with the India hub to address the skills shortage for advanced technologies in both regions.

HCL has already trained an initial batch of 26 local engineers who are already deployed on key projects in five regional hubs across South Africa, with plans to train 100 engineers at the centre over next 12 months.

The GCoE will serve customers either directly and indirectly through HCL’s partner network throughout Africa. It will also service clients by developing ICT skill-sets thus ultimately creating trained local personnel to deploy and manage advanced solutions.

The centre will support a number of vertical sectors including telecom service providers, BFSI, public sector and the retail & mining industry and joins the existing GCoEs in the US and EU in running dedicated recruitment and training programmes for college graduates.

Mr Ashish Gupta, Senior Vice President and Head - EMEA, HCL Infrastructure Services Division, HCL Technologies said: “As more and more companies in the West look for new avenues of growth, we are increasingly seeing a large demand for leading edge IT solutions coming in from emerging markets like Africa.’’

Mr Stefano Mattiello, Director, Channels for Cisco South Africa, said: “The centres of excellence we operate help us provide a global reach through the use of technology.’’

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