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>> Julien, thanks so much for being here today.
I want you to tell us who you are and what you do.
>> Hi Seth. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity.
I'm Julien Bertin, I'm
the Azure Business Lead for Middle East and Africa for Microsoft.
Middle East and Africa includes the entire African continent,
plus the entire Middle East Gulf region,
and Pakistan, which is 79 countries altogether.
>> What is going on in Middle East and Africa today?
>> Very exciting time for us.
We are on the second wave of investments.
We've announced opening of two new data centers,
one in Qatar and one in Israel.
Obviously following the data centers that we have
here in South Africa and ending the United Arab Emirates.
Those two new data centers are part of
four data centers that we have in
the region in four different countries,
and they're part of 56 Cloud regions
that we have worldwide in 21 countries.
>> What is Microsoft doing to
empower developers in the Middle East and Africa?
>> I've been in the region for
a while and I love the region and I'm very,
very happy about what Microsoft is doing here in the region.
We're actually supporting, literally,
the life cycle of a developer from
the time you graduate to the time you retire.
At every single step of the journey,
we have programs to reskill yourself.
Microsoft, we are fully embracing this journey with
the different programs that we're launching,
like students certifications.
If you are coming out of university and you're looking for a job,
we do placements as well,
so all sorts of things that,
again, supports the region.
Another thing that we did is we launched to
development centers in Kenya and Nigeria.
That's obviously is extremely exciting
because we are one of the first Cloud providers
to invest in development skills on the African continent.
Obviously, this is enabling us and
the people in the region to create the skills,
generate the value here,
in the region for Africa.
That's obviously something very exciting,
something we're very proud of and goes into Microsoft
willing to empower every individual and
every company in the world to become a tech leader.
>> I've heard about this program called Microsoft 4Afrika,
why don't you tell me a little bit more about what it is.
>> Microsoft 4Afrika is a program where
we help our students to develop skills.
We create skill labs where students can
learn about development and
some development tools on
all technologies that enable them to
build skills around certain technologies.
Up to date, we have trained 1.6 million Africans in Nigeria,
Kenya, Botswana, and other countries as well as South Africa.
We have 2,700 graduates to date out of those factories.
It's a fantastic, obviously investment that Microsoft is
making for the continent and it creates, again,
a lot of value and a lot of expertise that
will be available for
the Africans and for the different countries,
again, to leverage the power of those new technologies such as AI.
We are again very proud of this program and
the investments that we're making on the program itself.
>> Could you describe any success stories
that have come out of Microsoft 4Afrika?
>> In Kenya, we have a very good example,
a company called SunCulture.
They've developed a sun powered platform that
enables real-time collection of data of
different pumps and different sensors that are
on the different fields and crops,
that enable them to do micromanagement of irrigation.
As you know, in Kenya and in some parts of Africa,
the rain is not enough to grow crops and to produce food.
By leveraging Microsoft IoT services, Microsoft AI,
we're helping the farmers to better manage water and
resources that they have at their disposal based
on collecting information from the field,
and then making sure that the field is irrigated properly.
That the pump are moist the way they need to be
so they can optimize the repair time,
optimize the downtime of any of
the equipment that they have on the fields themselves.
That's obviously a very good example given
the environmental change and
all that we see around the climate change,
this is fantastic leverage of technology
combined with farmers and knowledge of
the fields here in Africa and how this will
enhance development of crops and food growing on the continent.
So very exciting and it's a company that
came out for the 4Afrika program.
>> If you could put everything into a nutshell,
what Microsoft is doing for
the Middle East and Africa, what would you say?
>> In a nutshell, we want to accelerate the digital transformation
and accelerate the capture of wealth that
comes out of the digital transformation
that we've seen anywhere else in the world.
By doing three things, we want to invest in infrastructure.
As I've mentioned earlier, we
are having four data centers in the region,
which no other Cloud providers is having.
We want to invest into skilling with 4Afrika programs and
lifetime programs that we are setting up
a key milestones of the development of an individual,
whether you are a student or non-graduate students,
or an employee and you need to reskill and
enabling innovation through the Cloud obviously,
which enable companies and individuals to get
access to the latest and greatest technologies
available without going through the hustle
of transforming all your environment.
>> Julien, thanks so much for spending some time with us.
It's been amazing to learn about the cool stuff that
Microsoft is doing in the Middle East and Africa.
>> Thank you Seth,
for giving me this opportunity.
I hope the information was useful and will be useful to
the developers and the developer community
that are watching this channel.
>> All right. Thanks so much for watching.
Don't forget to like and subscribe
to CodeStories to see what we're
up to here in Johannesburg and where we go to next.
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