Unisys Africa sponsors southern African telecoms conference

Unisys Africa will jointly sponsor the Southern African Telecommunications Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC) 2006 hosted by Telkom.

Joseph Gallagher, VP and managing partner, Unisys Global Communications Industry, UK, Middle East, India and Africa, will also present on next-generation services.

"The conference and associated Centre of Excellence has value to the industry as a whole and it is a means for us to invest back into research and development to the benefit of southern Africa," says Dean Baker, business unit head, telecommunications at Unisys Africa.

SATNAC reaches into industry, academia and the market and details progress in applied research in the information communications and technology (ICT) sector.

SATNAC is regarded as the flagship of the Telkom Centre of Excellence Programme and also a forum for postgraduate students to highlight successes achieved on their research.

"Besides its specific goals, SATNAC is also a good event for networking in the telecoms industry," Baker says.

This year`s conference will take place at the Spier wine estate in the Western Cape from Saturday, 2 September to Wednesday, 6 September. The conference will cover a raft of issues and topics ranging from access network technologies and optical, transport and core networks to protocols, software, network planning, network engineering, standardisation and innovation.

Gallagher has 15 years of experience in the global communications industry and prior to his tenure at Unisys was head of communications at KPMG in the UK and developed its communications consulting practice.

He will talk on converged services at the activity and application layer and the challenges that these services will face. According to Gallagher, it is critical that the industry is clear on what it will provide, how well the service will perform, and how the providers will guarantee it. More importantly, he says how easy the services are to adopt will be key in their market acceptance.

These will lead to five important factors:
1. Personalised services based on customer desires not vendor offering;
2. Ease of use because if it is too complicated the majority of the population will not adopt;
3. Quality of converged services;
4. Interactions between the customer and the product and between the provider and the customer will be key; and
5. Pragmatism in services that add to people`s lives.

The conference this year will focus on "next-generation services - the network @ work" and considering the proposed agenda, tutorials and presentations promises to be a very informative event.