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 datacentres and IoT,” explains George Senzere, pre-sales manager: anglophone for Secure Power Solutions at Schneider Electric South Africa.
“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 colocation datacentres 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 datacentres supporting the continent’s digital growth.
Adds Senzere: “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.”
The skills gap
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,” he explains.
“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.
“The industry we play in is very dynamic and fairly new. It also requires skills combinations that have not really been catered from the ground up by our various institutions. Take, for instance, a datacentre engineer – this is a new breed of specialists that are multi-skilled and may need a bit of electrical, mechanical and software competencies.”
Schneider Electric is talking the skills gap head on. The company’s Datacentre Science University and Energy University programmes for example are accessible to people across industry.
The channel
Keeping Africa always-on relies on a strong network of partners and suppliers. Schneider Electric focuses heavily on its channel partners, levering their knowledge and expertise to keep up with Africa’s digitisation strides.
“Our channel partner programme is multi-tiered; our elite business partners sit at the highest level. These are partners that can buy directly from us and enjoy the best discounts that we offer,” explains Senzere.
“Second are our premier partners who also buy directly from us at discounted prices. The last two partner categories (select and registered) buy from
us either through the elite and premier partners or through our distribution channel. To qualify as one of the partners requires rigorous training and meeting of business goals.
The sustainable future
Schneider Electric’s continued investment R&D and sustainable business practices form an important part in its role to bolster Africa’s digitisation strides. “Sustainability is everything, as our planet has finite resources. Whatever we do at Schneider Electric we would like to do in a sustainable way that preserves our environment and resources for future generations.
“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 colocation datacentres from some of the big names in technology, and growth in our own homegrown technology companies,” says Senzere.
“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,” he concludes.