African organizations that rely on IBM Corp.’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform will no longer have to keep their applications in another continent from now on. The vendor is inaugurating a new data center in Johannesburg today that aims to address the growing infrastructure demands of the region’s budding private sector.

The market for cloud services in South Africa is alone estimated to exceed $220 million, a revenue opportunity that IBM is well-positioned to seize: It’s one of the main technology suppliers to the country’s oldest bank and and boasts similarly strong ties with dozens of other major institutions throughout the continent. Such a well-established track record can go a long way toward securing a large infrastructure-as-a-service contract, especially considering that many of Big Blue’s rivals don’t have nearly as big of a presence in the region.

As a matter of fact, its two biggest competitors in the cloud market – Amazon Inc. and Microsoft Corp. – don’t even operate any local data centers. As a result, organizations with latency-sensitive workloads that can’t afford to wait on requests to be transmitted to another continent and back now have a major incentive to choose IBM’s platform. Its value proposition becomes even more appealing for companies in regulated industries like the healthcare sector, where certain types of sensitive information aren’t legally allowed to be exported to foreign jurisdictions.

Initially, however, Big Blue will focus its efforts mainly on courting SAP SE customers that are looking to move their on-premise implementations of its software outside the firewall. The vendor has teamed with a South African consultancy by the name of Gijima Group Limited to help walk organizations through the process of migrating their records to its new data center.

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