Johannesburg, 01 Jun 2011
Asher Bohbot, CEO of leading IT service provider, EOH, says that across the continent, the company is seeing African companies asking questions and making enquiries about IT and in particular, cloud technology.
"There have been many changes in the African IT landscape recently with the increase in fibre-optic cable coming to Africa. We still face significant challenges regarding last mile connectivity to enable African businesses to have sufficient connectivity; however, we anticipate that within the next 18 months, these challenges of connectivity in Africa will have been reduced dramatically," explains Bohbot.
He says that in the African market, EOH has a two-pronged strategy. "Initially we are looking at configuring, developing and delivering on-premises applications or private cloud applications that would reside in the African country itself. However, eventually we will deliver applications directly out of the cloud into African countries. For this to become a reality, we would need Africa`s inland connectivity capacity to increase to more than ADSL speeds," he says.
"This strategy to develop and deliver applications into Africa via the Internet would dramatically reduce the need to send a large team of developers into Africa for long periods of time. It would reduce the travelling and time away from home for the IT consultant. Furthermore it will decrease the costs of flights and accommodation for the client company. We will need a small team deployed in the African country itself, and the rest of the development can be done remotely from South Africa," says Bohbot.
EOH has approximately 8% of the local managed service market. Bohbot says EOH is well positioned with its broad service offering and is confident its foray into cloud computing will continue to grow: "Cloud computing is an evolution and process of outsourcing and EOH has been operating in this space for more than a decade. It extends and broadens our current service offering, which has been an important part of our success to date."
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