Maxava taps trusted reseller PARL to serve Africa's silicon savanah
PARTNER STORY
Perched on the high plains above the jungles of East Africa is the city of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and home to nearly 6 million people. As the commercial center of the region, Nairobi supports an emerging tech hub that has been dubbed the “Silicon Savanah.”
One of the companies that helped build Nairobi’s reputation for technological innovation is PARL, an IBM business partner that was founded in 1998 by Diane Huggins as Predictive Analytics Resources Limited.
For more than a decade, PARL was the top partner and reseller in the region for SPSS, the provider of the popular statistical package. PARL remains and is widely recognized as one of the longest-serving IBM business partners within the Central, East and West Africa region, specifically for the statistical analysis solutions suite.
Huggins diversified PARL’s business following IBM’s acquisition of SPSS in 2009, and today, PARL provides cybersecurity, cloud computing, and disaster recovery services to 600 clients through partnerships with Veeam, Zoho, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, and Red Hat, among others.
PARL’s new role as a tier 1 partner for Maxava marks an exciting opportunity for both organizations. Maxava is committed to expanding its IBM i software footprint across the dynamic Silicon Savannah region, while PARL enhances its solution portfolio to better serve both new and established customers.
The timing of the union couldn’t be better, as African companies grapple with increasing customer demands and a changing regulatory climate. It is common for banks in the region to go offline, forcing customers to wait until the systems are brought back up. But African consumers today increasingly are less tolerant of that downtime, particularly as digital payments become prevalent.
At the same time, Kenya’s Data Protection Act is forcing banks to invest more in data security and protection. Like the European Union’s GDPR, the DPA requires banks and other companies that handle personal information to follow certain security standards.
“They want to know for security purposes that their data is not being sold or being used without their knowledge or their permission,” Huggins said. “And it also gives them that protection and confidence that whatever classified material that could be held within their data is not going to be leaked out or exposed.”
Huggins is eager to begin selling Maxava’s disaster recovery and high availability software to banks and other IBM i customers in the East and Central Africa region, including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Sudan. As a trusted reseller, PARL already works with many banks in the area, and the addition of Maxava will bolster its reputation as a top-tier provider of business solutions.
“I’m very excited to be able to partner with Maxava because of the value they bring to the current IBM i customers,” Diane Huggins said. “I see an untapped market within this region which we could serve together.”
PARL received its DPA certification in 2024, and the company is ready to begin helping banks and other institutions protect their own data. Maxava offers several high availability and disaster recovery packages, including Maxava HA and Maxava Security, that can help customers protect their data and avoid downtime. The vendor also develops Mi8, which provides proactive monitoring and alerting of key IBM i metrics, plus other platforms.
As a longtime resident of Nairobi, Huggins has experienced the impact of banks being offline, and the opportunities it creates for cybercriminals. “This is a frequent thing,” she said. “You will get messages from banks that say, ‘I’m sorry, we have downtime until this time.’ But hackers like to target you when you’re down.”
High availability software used to be considered a luxury that only the biggest international corporations could afford, but that has changed immensely over the past 15 years. Maxava, more than anyone else, has been at the forefront of bringing down the cost of purchasing, implementing, and running high availability software for IBM i servers.
The banks of East Africa are excellent candidates for Maxava’s HA and DR software. Major banks in the region often have branches in several different countries, which make them ideal candidates to self-host secondary IBM i systems to protect their primary servers. Maxava’s software also supports full cloud and hybrid cloud setups, if the banks in the region prefer that approach.
Huggins is ready to begin working more closely with IBM i customers in East and Central Africa to ensure compliance with new regulations as well as to help them establish business continuity processes that will let them avoid both planned and unplanned downtime.
Huggins also knows a thing about business continuity herself. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kenyan authorities ordered businesses to stop allowing employees to gather. Like many other companies, PARL was forced to pivot almost overnight into a remote company. Through sheer grit and determination, Huggins kept the company running until the order was lifted.
“We survived the storm and stayed relevant, stayed operational due to the determination and the commitment that we have to our customers and to the business,” Huggins said. “I was in my office every single day during COVID. I was there by myself, but I was there, picking up the phone calls, dealing with inquiries, sending out quotations, dealing with tech support--all that kind of stuff. I was there every single day.”
The experience taught Huggins not only how susceptible business can be to unexpected interruptions, but also how to get through those interruptions. Now that PARL is in the business continuity business itself, that experience will build trust among customers that PARL will be there when they need it most.