THE ICT sphere has undergone distinct stages of evolution and has lately been focussing on going digital, which means shifting the paradigm from traditional business to an intelligent society.
Huawei President, Southern Africa Region, Mr Li Pengon has based on recent studies, seven out of 10 of the world’s fastest growing companies are in Africa, the beginning of a trend that will give rise to new digital economies.
“Digital strategy is generally best seen as a tripartite engagement between the government as enabler, carriers as promoters and technology partners as solution providers in a win-win context.
However, based on statistics from Hoot-suite, Africa is a relatively distinctive continent with only 29 percent of internet penetration and 14 percent active on social media.
Nonetheless, Africa is known to be the technological renaissance. He said that in 2016, GSMA has shown that 300+ hubs have emerged in the African Tech Startup ecosystem. Investors are recognising the potential as well, and so, going digital is a strategic decision for any African enterprise.
It does not only boost macro-economic growth but also solve legacy enterprise or carrier issues in terms of time to market, shrinking traditional revenue streams, controlling costs, driving new revenues, monetising investments, and achieving convergence,” he said.
He added that there are substantial benefits of digital versus the traditional way of conducting business, in the likes of improved efficiency, slimmer cost structure, faster time to market with focus on the customer, new services and openness.
Hence, he said cloud can be depicted as the stairway of digital strategy. The most optimal way to go about this change from legacy IT mode of operations to the digital world is by adopting modular and converged cloud architecture.
Mr Peng said choice of infrastructure is paramount to allow for future flexibility, scalability and evolution supporting all flavours of cloud, whether public, private, or hybrid. He said that many enterprises including banks have adopted cloud by initially moving internal and non-business critical applications before shifting the critical applications.