CLOUD COMPUTING IN AFRICA.

....Seacom known for its undersea optical fiber cables is expected to make their first move into offering cloud services with the launch of their Pamoja Cloud Services

Pamoja is a cloud services marketplace that the company says will revolutionize the way the SME sector conducts business. Seacom becomes the second infrastructure company to move into this space after Safaricom who launched their service about a year ago. Read Safaricom launches cloud services
According to the company website, Pamoja's business model is "built on the growing demand for IT-as-a-Service from small and medium enterprises (SME), coupled with the need for service providers to increase the value of their existing offerings and grow broadband revenue." Pamoja is building a SME Cloud services marketplace, which it will then offer to its channel partners and service providers to on-sell under their own brand (white-labelled) to their customer base.
Pamoja is expected to "remove the capital expense barrier to entry for International content owners who want to expand their service footprint to the African continent; no upfront capital investment is required," the statement said.
Pamoja is investing, initially, in Cloud computing infrastructure in South Africa and Kenya. This will allow Pamoja to service the Southern African markets with a strong focus on South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia. From the Kenyan based platform services will be delivered to Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and South Sudan.
 To the technical teams in pamoja Cloud Services,applesam ventures ans samtech investments salute your panache of your work.Keep up the nifty work folks.

Source:Applesam ventures
Credit-sam

MOBILE TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENTS IN AFRICA

.....Although still in its infancy, Africa is experiencing exciting technological advances thanks to a boom in mobile phone use of the past decade and the growing availability of the Smart Phone, with its advanced features and opportunities.

In many parts of Africa, the use of mobile phones is higher than computers, allowing for growth in the nations educational avenues. It has been well documented that over the past few years Africa has struggled with low levels of educational opportunities and access, a shortage of teaching staff, low level literacy and numeracy.

The answer for many lies in the opportunities that new Smart Phone technology can offer in the field of education. Computing in the average African schools consists of a small computer lab, but thanks to rapid growth in mobile phone technology, the possibility of distance learning is closer than ever before.

The smart phone could provide the answer to educating those in remote areas. Research carried out by applesam ventures indicated that 96% of the distance education students had access to mobile phones, while only 1% had access to the internet at home.

In the Western world our mobile phones have become handheld computers. But in Africa, where many of the population have poor electric supplies and affordability issues, the mobile phone companies and developers have ensured that mobile phones are the primary source of communication. It has the ability to do things such as mobile banking(m-pesa). There are 84m internet-enabled mobiles in Africa and it is predicted that 69% of mobiles in Africa will have internet access by the year 2014.

Social networking such as Facebook in Africa is on the up and in turn, debate and interactive learning is transforming the education system. People, young and old, on the continent can access knowledge on their mobile phone devices.

Mobile learning on Smart Phones differs from e-learning on computers in that activities are not set in one place and can be conducted at any time and at any place.

Examples of this mobile education are in farming and their livelihoods. A number of smartphones have been leased to farmers so that they can receive information, such as market prices, weather reports and advice and pass this information on to others.

There are barriers to mobile learning in Africa, such as illiteracy levels, access issues (remote areas and price factors) and a gender gap (more men have mobile phones than women). However, thanks to the availability of solar power and mobiles running on much less power than computers, education through mobile phones is becoming a great possibility to help those formerly excluded from educational opportunities.

Smart phone technology offers advanced systems such as interactive voice response (IVR) and barriers are breaking down, with mobile phone usage becoming more affordable.

Africa Initiatives is a Microsoft project focusing on Africa with the release of ‘Huawei 4Afrika’ Windows 8 smartphone and the creation of the ‘Afrika Academy’ to teach Africans important business and entrepreneurial skills.

If Smart Phone technology is developed in a robust, low cost manner, more and more Africans will continue to take advantage of this information technology and new and exciting learning styles available to them.

Source:applesam ventures

SEACOM PROMISES FOR FURTHER UPGRADE

...The privately owned communications service provider SEACOM has selected Ciena Corporation’s (NASDAQ: CIEN) 6500 Packet-Optical Platform and OneControl Unified Management System for the upgrade of its submarine network across the Southern and Eastern African coastlines. This falls in line with SEACOM’ s focus on driving the development of the African internet and opening the broadband tap for African consumers.
Ciena’s technology will allow SEACOM to meet the growing capacity demands of its customers and enable affordable Internet access to East Africa with a network that offers a better cost point and a smoother evolution path for the future.
The upgrade includes key countries in SEACOM’s 17,000km undersea network, including India, Egypt, Dijbouti, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa. The solution will allow SEACOM to deliver its capacity in very short timeframes and provide for future demands. The deployment will initially use Ciena’s 40G coherent transport technology, with ultra-long distance 100G wavelengths planned for future upgrades.
“Connectivity services in Africa are booming due to the growing needs of business IT users, the rise of ”cloud” based services, and growing requirements for the processing and storing of personal data,” says Claes Segelberg, chief technology officer at SEACOM. “Ciena’s technology will enable us to cost-effectively scale our capacity to address this growing demand for connectivity throughout the continent. The company’s future-proof network design has mitigated the risks associated with the upgrade project, ensuring a seamless transition for SEACOM’s carrier customers and end users.”

 Ed McCormack, vice president and general manager, submarine systems at Ciena said: “In the last couple of years, bandwidth penetration in several African countries has increased tenfold with the support of SEACOM’s submarine network. Ciena’s coherent technology will enable SEACOM to evolve and grow its network cost-effectively. It will lay the foundations for a unified terrestrial and submarine network and evolution path to a GeoMesh network architecture. This project demonstrates a key aim of Ciena’s OPⁿ network architecture vision: to bend the cost curve of networking in the face of new service requirements.”
For folks wondering about Ciena;


Ciena is the network specialist.It collaborates with customers worldwide to unlock the strategic potential of their networks and fundamentally change the way they perform and compete. Ciena leverages its deep expertise in packet and optical networking and distributed software automation to deliver solutions in alignment with OPⁿ, its approach for building open next-generation networks. It enables a high-scale, programmable infrastructure that can be controlled and adapted by network-level applications, and provide open interfaces to coordinate computing, storage and network resources in a unified, virtualized environment.

About SEACOM
SEACOM, the only privately funded and truly neutral carrier in its market, is a bandwidth solution enabler with an extensive network of submarine and terrestrial high speed fibre serving the east and west coasts of Africa with onward reach to and from Europe, India and Asia.
In service since July 2009, SEACOM has increased the availability of International bandwidth in Africa ten-fold and more in many of Africa’s most underserved nations – providing high quality, cost effective, end-to-end wholesale connectivity.
SEACOM sees Africa as a rich source of content and ICT activity and continues its commitment to closing Africa’s digital divide by building a truly African Internet.

After experiencing some few short comings a couple of weeks earlier  due to fiber cut vandalism in the upper part of our African continent,one of the 5 sub marine FO providers have promised to upgrade their network system robustly.I and applesam ventures wish SEA COM all the very best in their en devours.

Source:www.samwelkariuki.com
Credit:Samwel kariuki