Cisco is bullish about driving its collaboration technology portfolio into Africa. However, World Wide Worx claims local corporates are not ready for this technology, as ubiquitous broadband is still lacking.
In a recent visit to SA, Joe Burton, CTO of Cisco voice technology group, points out that the company has created a suite of unified communication products that can be hosted in the cloud, the data centre, or a combination of the two.
Burton believes the key to solving business complexities; increasing profitability; and allowing closer working between businesses, their partners and customers, lies in using collaboration tools in the cloud.
He explains that the company is converging social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook applications into a system hosted offsite that connects instant messaging, document collaboration, e-mail and VOIP solutions.
According to Burton, these technologies are gaining traction in the US and Europe, but the lack of affordable and accessible broadband in Africa is hampering the growth potential of the technology on the continent.
Burton says: “Africa and emerging markets tend to be extremely creative and our collaboration message resonates in Africa. However, bandwidth is more limited in SA than the US and Western Europe. So our next focus will be to optimise our products so they can work on lower bandwidth requirements and still provide a good video experience.”
Hold your horses
Stephen Ambrose, MD of World Wide Worx Strategy, says the South African corporate market is not yet ready to advance to connected applications.
“The reason for this,” explains Ambrose, “is because ubiquitous connectivity is a recent phenomenon in SA and we haven't had years of being connected to uncapped high-capacity Internet.”
Ambrose says corporates are still wary of giving up control of their infrastructure and information to the cloud. “They have not yet had enough time to fully understand the benefits of moving their services and systems into the cloud.”
He adds: “A true broadband culture has not yet emerged in the users of these services. The whole culture of being connected, in the South African context, is going to take time.”
Ambrose explains it's not just the quality of broadband that's hampering the wide-scale adoption of collaboration tools in the country, but the experience users have online.
“Corporate workers are not ready to move to these systems yet. Very few corporates embrace the new communication ethos that social networking brings. This also extends to small and medium-size enterprises. We are going to be seeing big changes but right now we are not ready for this technology.”
According to Ambrose, World Wide Worx has conducted research detailing the Internet experience curve showing that in SA, it takes around five years for a new Internet user to gain the confidence to pursue more complex activities such as Internet banking, social networking and cloud computing.
Ambrose notes: “Essentially, it is a five-year curve; however, broadband and access to ubiquitous Internet can reduce that experience time-span to three years. And after that we will start to see more corporates using these tools.”
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