2010: ICT’s year of great expectations

In addition, managed services will gain significant ground as communication costs decrease with the availability of new submarine Internet cables and as IT needs grow more complex with rapid technology change. The region, especially Kenya will be among countries to experience booming BPO industry. Currently contact centres are constrained by high communications costs.

Mid last year, Kenya kicked off an ambitious Digital Villages project designed to connect the whole country, from rural to urban areas, and accelerate growth of ICT. The project is a government and private-sector initiative, mapped out using political districts. It is expected that every constituency represented in parliament will get a minimum of eight work stations, either PCs or monitors hooked to PCs, grouped within a 15-kilometre radius.

It is also expected that other countries in the region will follow Kenya’s example to migrate from analogue to digital broadcast. Kenya becomes the second nation in Africa after South Africa to adopt digital broadcasting. This has been hailed as the biggest technology shifting of TV broadcast after the colour television. Currently, transmission covers Nairobi and its environs.

Key challenge however will be to properly capture, manage and deliver meaningful information to the right users which is putting a premium on data management and information access. Increased availability of broadband in Africa will exacerbate this explosion and companies will need to carefully control data management.

It is also expected that there will be an even greater focus on data centre efficiency, IT consolidation and automation with the new environment reflecting concern around costs and improved utilisation rates of current assets. Most companies expanding into the region will look at acquiring companies with a majority stake (at least 51 per cent) this leads to headaches in terms of consolidating applications, systems and, of course, data centres.

The sector will continue to be bombarded with malicious threats to IT infrastructure: viruses, spam, spyware, leakage, phishing, identify theft. Centralisation and the consolidation of data centre infrastructure will help improve physical security.