Pattern Matched Technologies (PMT) has achieved AWS Select Tier Services Partner status.
AWS Select Tier Services Partners employ trained and certified individuals and have proven customer experience.
Markus Schorn
PMT has enabled some of Africa’s most prominent banks, insurers, fintechs and retailers to launch cloud-based offerings and services with AWS, according to CEO Markus Schorn.
He adds that the company has a 16-year history of providing solution-enabling products and services to its clients, helping them to launch new products or deliver better services to their own customers.
As a pioneer in the hosted environment, Schorn explains that the business has been built on the re-invention of the data centre industry that has been coming for years.
PMT started working with AWS six years ago and, as an early adopter of the platform, has built up a wealth of expertise.
“It’s estimated that fewer than 2% of African corporates have adopted public cloud because many of them are still struggling to understand how to undertake this journey,” says Schorn. “Our role is to offer them consulting services, and to help them deploy solutions.”
For all that public cloud offers a wealth of benefits, it’s not an easy journey by any means, he adds. “We have learnt some very difficult lessons and, because we have experienced the pain ourselves, are able to ease the journey for our clients.
“We have a long history of enhancing the edge and building edge solutions, and this means we are in a good position to help our clients in understanding how to adopt cloud technologies.”
As an AWS Select Tier Services Partner, PMT has the competence to consult on AWS deployments. “We can help and guide customers in using our own solution on AWS, but also work with them on the overall architecture and building their total solution.”
The company has a wealth of experience that it can draw on to aid clients, and Schorn stresses that it is constantly learning and building new skills. “We are striving to build African competence in the AWS solution set by investing heavily in our own resources.”
There is no doubt that enterprises will move to cloud computing, with many of them taking the first steps now. “A lot of our clients want to move at least part of their systems away from the legacy environment,” Schorn says. “They are recognising the costs associated with hiring competent skills to manage, scale and secure their data centre environments.
“These are the main issues we are working with them to solve: how they can move all or part of their solutions to the cloud, and securely scale them.”
Done right, a move to the cloud offers many benefits. “A system that cost $1-million to install just 10 years ago would cost less than R300 000.00 to set up in AWS today,” says Schorn.
“Meanwhile, integration and running costs could be vastly reduced as well – provided you know what you are doing.”
All of PMT’s engineering staff have some kind of AWS certification, many of them with advanced training. And this training is an ongoing exercise. “We are in a constant learning curve and always have some courses and certifications underway that will help us to enhance the business,” Schorn says.
Pieter Janse van Rensburg
Pieter Janse van Rensburg, Chief Technology Officer at PMT, adds that the company has a cloud-first and AWS-first approach to new business, and has deployed its own software solutions on the cloud.
“We position some of our main products in AWS, so it is a major driver for us.”
And, because it delivers its own solutions in AWS, PMT is in a great position to help clients with their complete cloud journey.
“Because we integrate with their systems, we are familiar with any shortcomings of knowledge gaps they may have – a place where we can add our expertise in helping to guide integration, scaling, security, and redundancy issues.
“This is where we can start and partner with clients to deliver our expertise.”
This is just the start of PMT’s journey with AWS, Janse van Rensburg adds: “Being appointed as a Select Tier Service Partner is a good and solid stepping stone, allowing us to expand our knowledge and expertise.
“We are looking to massive growth in the next 12 to 18 months.”
PMT Solutions
Among the solutions, PMT brings to market are e-wallet and mobile money technology, transaction processing and payment systems, a variety of fintech products, and bespoke solution development.
Its new AWS flagship product, the Obsidian™ Service Connectivity Platform delivers end-to-end connectivity and visibility for services in multi-cloud environments. It is a service connectivity platform for the modern enterprise where the ability to accelerate the enablement and exposure of services, in an agile, secure, and scalable way, is key to success.
Obsidian™ incorporates all the AWS lessons learnt and is a flexible platform with a particular focus on security and integration for enterprise deployments.
Amber provides USSD Services, SIM Securitisation for Banking and has pioneered Network Initiated USSD (NI USSD). With Amber USSD companies are able to provide Value-Added Services (VAS) to their customers.
Emerald is a Flexible Virtual Voucher Distribution System for retail vouchers, prepaid services such as airtime and electricity; and Crimson is a Financial Transaction Processing Platform; and Amethyst Core Grade Wallet Solution is a powerful alternative payment system.
PMT offers its solutions in the AWS cloud and helps customers to co-create the most effective deployment. For instance, one customer has been using a PMT solution for 12 years, first on-premise and now in the cloud.
“Putting our solutions into AWS makes it easier to ensure security for the customer,” Schorn explains. “When it comes to scaling, now we simply run a script and can be live in several global territories. You can’t do that if you are bound to a local data centre.”
The company plans to make its Obsidian product widely available on AWS and is already working to double its engineering team.
The First Distribution difference
PMT’s relationship with First Distribution is key to its endeavours, Schorn says. “Whatever we do when it comes to AWS projects, we can be sure that First Distribution is there fighting for us.”
About Pattern Matched Technologies
Pattern Matched Technologies was founded over 15 years ago, focusing on delivering innovation and low costs across multiple industry types, but with a keen focus on the intersection between the mobile and financial sectors. PMT has been the first to market with many essential products that enable corporate and consumer solutions at scale. PMT is an award-winning software developer, well known for its critical innovations in mobile banking, remittance wallets & debit cards, value-added service delivery and mobile banking security solutions. For more information, click here (www.patternmatched.com)
About First Distribution
First Distribution is the leading value-added distributor in Africa. Our offering includes a product portfolio of global leading Datacentre, Cloud, Networking and Security products and services. This embraces hybrid solutions with access to any combination of on premise, private cloud and public cloud end-to-end solutions from multiple vendors. The portfolio, together with highly skilled staff to support and manage vendors with an unrivalled level of expertise, ensures that our partners have the key elements required for success. First Distribution additionally hosts one of the largest technology partner-to-partner networks in Africa allowing partners to extend the reach of their solutions across the continent.
Start building on AWS today with First Distribution: contact us on +27 11 540 2640 or email us at aws@firstdistribution.com.