HCL, Cisco launch CoE in South Africa

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

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

The GCoE which will be operated by HCL, who had also opened a similar Global Cisco Hub in India before.

The centre 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 retail & mining industry and joins existing GCoEs in the US and EU in running dedicated recruitment and training programs for college graduates.

A pilot programme running at centers in Seattle WA and Cary North Carolina in the US, Helsinki in Finland, Krakow in Poland, Dublin in Ireland, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, Dubai in UAE and Singapore has already provided a platform for developing IT skill pool in local communities through collaboration with anchor customers and universities.