Cisco`s annual Networkers event for Europe, Middle East and Africa has come to SA for the first time, attracting 1 700 delegates from across the region this week.
Networkers events were previously held in Europe and the US, with Africa hosting Cisco Expo Africa. The rebranding and shift in venue marks a further move into the international spotlight for SA.
Paying homage to "Mother Africa, where the human journey started", Thorsten Freitag, Cisco MD for sub-Saharan Africa, opened proceedings. "Africa has 800 million people in 53 countries, or one-eighth of the world population. But it has only one-fiftieth of the world`s phones, one-seventieth of its PCs, and one-hundredth of Internet connections."
Freitag said African leaders regard information and communications technologies as key to enabling better productivity and service levels, and with Internet users doubling every year, the opportunities in Africa are considerable.
Cisco EMEA president Rob Lloyd presented the keynote of the day, saying most business indicators the world over this quarter are on an upward trend for the first time since IT-spend nose-dived. "This shows a balanced set of conditions for a return to spend," he said, adding that the period to follow would be more normal than the extraordinary events of 1999 - the telco funding boom, Y2K and Internet commerce.
What will the money be spent on?
Lloyd said spending would focus on strategies to keep costs low, re-engineer business processes, increase productivities, shore up customer relations, improve efficiencies and enable citizen-centricity.
"When in the last while have you come across an environment that didn`t want any of these?"
In keeping with this, the applications that are attracting CIOs` attention focus on collaboration, business-to-business, Web services, IP telephony, video conferencing, storage networks, distributed data centres, content distribution and data centre consolidation.
"Key to this is that the network must connect any-to-any, have scalable bandwidth, feature converged qualities, guarantee quality of service, be secure and highly available, incorporate mobility and feature high manageability," Lloyd added.
"In summary, the world is more certain about the applications it needs, and the network will be central to that," he said.
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