Deloitte Digital corners African Apache Cassandra space

Deloitte Digital now has the first two licensed Apache Cassandra practitioners on the continent.
The Apache Cassandra database is a distributed database management system designed to manage large amounts of data across multiple commodity servers, with no single point of failure. It allows for scalability and high availability without compromising performance. Cassandra is used by many organisations that have large, active data sets like the Apple Corporation, Netflix, eBay, Facebook and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
“Our Cassandra capabilities are a quantum leap in our ability to meet our clients’ unique challenges,” says Thys Bruwer, the director of Deloitte Digital Technology Integration. “Digital innovation is changing the world into a more complex, uncertain place, and that change is only going to accelerate in the future. Deloitte Digital is always seeking to be on the crest of the wave of change, and we are now able to deliver smart, innovative solutions to African problems at a fraction of the cost traditionally associated with these projects.”
“The Cassandra capability will be of particular use in the digital banking innovation space, allowing Deloitte Digital to build multinational, flexible and lower cost banking models that build on existing technology and circumvent many of the current challenges,” says Deloitte Digital Associate Director for Technology Integration, Ernst Swanepoel.
“Remittance is a big challenge on the African continent. Sending money can take weeks, and attracts high fees. As we know, in the African context, people often want to transfer low value amounts across border, but are prohibited because of the cost of the transaction. New developments related to the underpinning payments technology, enable this at a fraction of the traditional cost,” says Bruwer.
Deloitte Digital is able to utilise, and pay-on-use for Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host components or complete solutions that scale as and when required, based on transactional demand. This service removes the need for a bank to own expensive and mostly redundant infrastructure that only scales on certain occasions.
Deloitte Digital is also the strategic partner of MuleSoft, its cloud-based enterprise service bus (ESB) and integration platform of choice. MuleSoft is a dynamic technology platform that connects different applications, using Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) and allows them to exchange data, that resides either on-premise or in the cloud. This gives it the ability to integrate legacy systems with new innovative solutions, and accommodates the need to scale this integration platform on-demand.
In 2015, Deloitte Digital was awarded the Global Partner of the Year by MuleSoft.
Kennedy Research identified Deloitte Digital as a global leader in Digital Customer Strategy and Experience Consulting. In the 2015 Digital Customer Strategy and Experience Consulting report, Deloitte Digital is positioned highest in “Breadth of Consulting Capabilities” on The Kennedy VanguardTM. The report noted that Deloitte Digital is poised to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the “experience is the new marketing” trend. The trend indicates that Chief Marketing Officers are increasingly foregoing traditional marketing campaigns in favour of investing in the customer experience. This has resulted in a shift of marketing spend moving from traditional advertising agencies to digital consulting agencies.
Furthermore, for the fifth consecutive year, Gartner has ranked the Deloitte member firms (Deloitte) as the number one global consulting organisation based on 2014 market share revenue in their report Market Share Analysis: Consulting Services Worldwide, 2014.