Technical operations ran without a hitch on the opening day of GovTech, says systems management company Columbus SA.
Columbus SA is providing management and support for all the machines and software at GovTech, an annual conference focused on public sector ICT hosted by the State IT Agency (SITA).
This year's event, at the Durban International Convention Centre from 13 to 16 September, runs under the theme 'Doing ICT for the citizens'.
Theo Fourie, CEO of Columbus SA, says the company has provisioned and is managing more than 220 PCs and servers, with conference proceedings running smoothly so far. "We have created the infrastructure for registration, organisation and presentation, and the press centre and Internet caf'e are entirely installed and managed through our technology.”
Fourie says registration procedures have improved compared to last year. “On the technical side, the SITA team have been very positive; any glitches have been invisible to the conference-goer.”
This is the third year the company has fulfilled this role, and Fourie says it took a roughly a week-and-a-half to set up the entire architecture. “Every year a different vendor sponsors the event, so we had to get all the relevant hardware - the blade servers, models, machines, and driver sets - in place.”
Services include a full Internet caf'e where delegates can access e-mail, and a VOIP system to allow conference-goers to make phone calls whenever, wherever. Fourie says various exhibitors will also use the machines to run demonstrations of new technologies and programs.
All the PCs and servers are automatically rebuilt on a daily basis, according to Fourie, to be in defined condition before the conference starts in the morning. “When the delegates come in the next day, everything is like new.”
On show
Columbus also demonstrated a pre-release of Version 7 of its software, which maximises the new Windows 7. "Our focus has shifted from technical disciplines to the often underestimated organisational requirements and legal requirements of asset, licence and contract management combined with business workflows that define when and what should happen based on whose decision,” explains Fourie.
"We have changed our architecture to move from a central, database-driven model into an active messaging architecture with far greater scalability and active notification and alerting technology.”
According to Fourie, conference delegates and government representatives are not looking to spend money, but exploring solutions that will enable them to use technology to improve services. “They're looking at how government can use IT to reduce and manage costs for effective service delivery.”
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