[SatNews] With immediate effect, the South African company Business Connexion (Pty.) Ltd. (BCX) is launching a low latency satellite cloud computing service, powered by ND SatCom’s XWARP.

The IT and satellite communication solution by ND SatCom will allow the South African company to improve its internal communications with its subsidiaries as well as offer its customers access to cloud computing services. BCX is one of the world's largest operators of computing centers and the first to operate a tier four data center in Africa, which guarantees 99.995 percent service availability. The ICT service provider’s modern computing center in Midrand has high-security, scalable and modern infrastructure for business-critical IT systems. BCX’s customers come from all over Africa, sometimes from remote areas, where there is no, or very unstable and unreliable Internet access. With ND SatCom’s XWARP, BCX customers have state-of-the-art technology and can use virtually latency-free cloud computing.

XWARP is the first satellite-based solution that offers companies with remote sites that suffer from a lack of services, immediate, virtually latency-free and bandwidth-optimized access to their hosted applications. This is a real bonus for business and latency-critical applications such as SAP, Oracle Financials, SharePoint and other time-critical applications. The satellite-based system can be integrated into existing corporate infrastructures, e.g., as a back-up solution, or can be rolled out as an entirely new network environment for remote locations. The interaction of its various components, such as Citrix virtualization technologies, the Zero Latency Engine, intelligent SPSN management (Secure Private Satellite Network) connections, and the tried-and-tested satellite modem SkyWAN, enable zero latency. XWARP technology encodes and compresses the data and by intelligent management reduces the satellite bandwidth which in turn leads to greater cost efficiency.

The project in Midrand was a joint venture with the South African partner Q-KON, a satellite service provider headquartered in South Africa. It offers the African telecommunications market ready-to-use network services. Q-KON and ND SatCom have already had a close partnership since 2001 and worked on many VSAT projects. Since August 2010, Q-KON has been an official reseller for XWARP on the African market.