Chris Duvenage, Digital Solutions Business Unit Manager at NEC XON.
NEC Africa and PowerX have announced a strategic partnership to deliver intelligent remote management system (RMS) and energy efficiency solutions for large, distributed telecommunications networks across Africa. The partnership combines NEC's proven track record of large-scale ICT delivery across Africa with PowerX's market-leading machine learning and AI analytics platform. The result is a single, accountable technology partner able to proactively manage the full cell site infrastructure life cycle – from design and deployment through to ongoing operations and optimisation.
Says Chris Duvenage, Business Unit Manager: Digital, NEC XON: "We've spent the last two years evaluating platforms that could genuinely meet the needs of Africa's telecommunications operators. What impressed us about PowerX is that it goes well beyond power monitoring. It combines AI-driven predictive analytics, asset life cycle optimisation, proactive maintenance and remote operational control into a single platform that enables NEC Africa to deliver a far more intelligent, end-to-end solution. Together, we will help operators reduce costs, improve network resilience and gain the visibility they need to manage critical infrastructure at scale across Africa."
Addressing Africa's critical infrastructure challenges
Africa's telecommunications sector faces significant operational pressures, including energy inefficiency, remote site management complexity, generator and power asset degradation, and infrastructure vulnerability – as well as vandalism and theft at base transceiver station (BTS) sites. These challenges increase operational expenditure, reduce network uptime and undermine the delivery of digital services to millions of subscribers.
Andrew Schafer CEO of PowerX.
"Partnering with NEC Africa gives PowerX the on-the-ground integration capability and pan-African reach to deploy our platform at scale across some of the continent's most demanding environments. Together, we are putting data intelligence at the heart of tower and site management decisions – driving down costs, improving performance and sustainability outcomes and giving operators the visibility they need to perform,” says PowerX CEO, Andrew Schafer.
Plans go beyond the telco industry
The partnership isn’t limited to the telecommunications sector either. The solution holds significant cross-industry potential for commercial, retail, public sector and industrial clients across Africa facing similar challenges with their critical infrastructure. Both companies see a clear opportunity to combine NEC Africa's system integration expertise with PowerX's AI-driven energy management platform to yield key end-to-end efficiency benefits across commercial and industrial solar, smart city deployments and energy-intensive enterprise infrastructure. The combined solution delivers the PowerX hardware-agnostic AI SaaS platform integrated with proven IOT hardware, providing telecommunications operators with a single end-to-end fulfilment and implementation service enabling:
- Full site visibility and remote monitoring across BTS, power systems and environmental conditions.
- AI-driven energy optimisation, including generator, solar, batteries and hybrid power monitoring and fuel consumption tracking.
- Embedded security and tamper-detection capabilities to combat infrastructure vandalism and theft.
- Predictive and prescriptive maintenance to reduce unplanned downtime and operational expenditure.
- Seamless interoperability with existing operator systems and third-party platforms.
- SLA-backed support from local NEC Africa engineering teams, ensuring rapid response and continuous optimisation.
- End-to-end field services capability spanning design, build, implementation, commissioning and ongoing maintenance – delivered by NEC Africa's established engineering teams across sub-Saharan Africa.
"Our customers are looking for more than monitoring – they need actionable intelligence," Duvenage says. "By combining PowerX's advanced analytics with NEC Africa's engineering capability and pan-African delivery footprint, we're giving customers a single accountable partner that can implement, integrate and optimise complex infrastructure throughout its operational life cycle."
