NEWS
Centre to broaden
digital footprint of
South Africa’s languages
Blue Turtle
becomes a
Microsoft
Cloud Platform
Gold Partner
B
lue Turtle Technologies has been
appointed as Microsoft Gold Partner for
the Cloud competency.
“Our appointment as a Microsoft Gold
Partner for the Cloud competency is
as a result of our investment in Azure
competencies and the great support we have
received from the Microsoft team in South
Africa,” said Avash Maharaj, Cloud Business
Manager at Blue Turtle.
“Today, we are delivering a range of
innovative solutions for cloud that deliver
real value to customers.”
Mervyn Yan, Product Manager at Blue Turtle,
added: “Building our team, and developing
our Microsoft Cloud skills, has enabled us
to offer clients access to a range of services
and all the advantages that go along with
working with a Microsoft Gold Partner.
10
T he Deputy Minister of Higher
Education and Science and
Technology, Buti Manamela, has
officially launched the South African
Centre for Digital Language Resources
(SADiLaR) in Potchefstroom. Potchefstroom Campus, SADiLAR is
one of eight research infrastructures
established through the Department of
Science and Innovation (DSI), intended
to provide research infrastructure across
the public research system.
This is a platform that creates and
manages digital resources and software
supporting research and development
in language technologies and language-
related studies in all South Africa’s
official languages. So far it has benefited over 1,000
students and around90 researchers and
developers. This virtual infrastructure
hosts a resource portal that provides a
single point of entry with access to over
200 language resources and tools.
SADiLaR is a multi-partner distributed
research infrastructure, comprising the
Council for Scientific and Industrial
Research, the University of South Africa,
the University of Pretoria, and the
Inter-institutional Centre for Language
Development and Assessment, and is
currently hosted by North-West University.
Hosted by the North-West University’s Fields of research include language,
literary and heritage studies,
history, music, sociology, journalism,
philosophy, psychology, media studies,
and visual and graphic art. In turn,
the availability of large data sets
facilitates the development of a variety
of language technology applications for
the public good.
INTELLIGENTCIO
“It is a recognition of our capability to deliver,
develop and deploy on Microsoft’s proven
cloud platform, delivering both innovative
software and ‘as-a-service’ offerings.”
Through its alignment with Microsoft best
practice, Blue Turtle is helping businesses with
their migration to Microsoft Azure, ensuring
that the right workloads are moved to cloud,
where it makes financial and business sense.
As part of its Azure services, the company
already assists clients with discovery,
assessment, migration, optimisation,
operation and security for Azure.
www.intelligentcio.com