Switched on to the new era
AFRICA has become a shining beacon for technology investment and innovation, unlocking the continent’s economic potential and driving transformation.
Today, many of the world’s multinationals have a presence on the continent which is undoubtedly indicative of increasing confidence in Africa and its people.
We are seeing a lot of investment into the technology sector in the Anglophone region, particularly in the areas of data centres and IoT.
Some of the internet giants today have arrived on our shores already and some are soon to do so. These are exciting times for us. We see start-up companies building co-location data centres which are hosting other businesses’ IT infrastructure – big and small, they are coming in droves.
The growth in African investment is driven by IoT, the need for latency, cost of bandwidth and regulatory requirements. This in turn has led to a distributed IT infrastructure with local and regional data centres supporting the continent’s digital growth.
In this new digital era, we see a world that is always on. Always on to meet the needs of the highest notion of access to goods and services. Always on to be the solid, reliable foundation of digital transformation for businesses.
Our mission is very simple – to empower the digital transformation of our customers by ensuring their critical networks, systems and processes are highly available and resilient.
Critical to the success of Africa’s digitisation is knowledge which, according to Senzere, remains an ongoing challenge. Technology has been changing at a very rapid pace; however, our educational institutions have not been able to adapt their educational curriculars.
Only recently have we seen adjustment in some of this content in a few of the institutions, and what this means is that in certain areas of the technological divide there are serious shortages of relevant skills. Skills migration has not helped either. Other, more developed parts of the world are sucking up skills from anywhere and everywhere they can find them.
Sustainability in our world means looking out for our environment, and it extends to everything we do, including running a green supply chain, addressing the energy gap and engaging in sustainable people practices.
There is no doubt that Africa’s technology innovation future looks bright; it’s an exciting time to conduct business on the continent.
Industry analysts are predicting a huge growth in the number of connected devices. We have already seen the entrance of regional co-location data centres from some of the big names in technology, and growth in our own home-grown technology companies.
We are already geared up for the edge computing revolution knocking on our doorsteps with tailor-made solutions, and IoT has already shaped our lives today in one form or another and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.
• George Senzere is the pre-sales manager, Anglophone, for Secure Power Solutions at Schneider Electric South Africa