As part of its increased investment in the Africa Development Centre, Microsoft has transferred ownership and ongoing product development of Azure Active Directory Domain Services, a Microsoft Security product generating annual revenue of USD 40 million and serving 300,000 enterprise global customers, to the ADC located in Nairobi.
Microsoft’s transfer of ownership and investment in the Africa Development Centre (ADC) represents a significant milestone, showcasing the company’s dedication to fostering technology skills and talent in Africa through its premier engineering arm. Catherine Muraga, Managing Director of Microsoft ADC, expressed that the expanded investment signifies the company’s confidence in the talented individuals already present at the ADC.
“Not only do we want to grow product ownership within ADC, but we also want to develop more experts in the field. This is an opportunity to highlight the ADC’s growth and impact,” said Ms. Muraga who, as the Engineering Director, will lead the teams that will be working on this product.
Azure Active Directory Domain Services is a group of features that enable Microsoft customers to create and manage their organizations identities on Azure cloud services. These identities enable customers to transfer or operate software applications that are run from their physical servers to Azure cloud services.
An Azure AD DS managed domain lets organizations run applications that cannot use modern authentication methods in the cloud. Organizations can lift and shift these legacy applications from their on-premises environment into a managed domain, without needing to deploy, manage or patch domain controllers.
The announcement came shortly after a visit by Igor Sakhnov, Microsoft Executive Vice President, Engineering, which included a review of the ADC’s operations and a review of its partnerships aimed at building capacity for tech talent.
The centre recently announced the completion of a joint curriculum review process with Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and is currently providing skills training to university lecturers as part of efforts to improve the tech talent pipeline.