CIOs and IT managers are increasingly faced with challenges to understand and implement new computing trends such as business mobility, in – memory computing and the cloud. The AITEC East Africa ICT summit kicked off today with industry players from East Africa at pains to demisfy and share their views on these  new technology trends.

Sean Moroney, Chairman, AITEC Africa said the two-day conference is primarily educative, focused on encouraging new business enterprises to rethink their IT spending and drive innovation through cloud computing. This means more business enterprises in East Africa will become unwired and get to achieve mobility through various mobile devices with access to cloud services.

All these technologies are possible with the availability of broadband connectivity in East Africa.  Slowly the industry enters into the “Big data” era and IT enterprise departments will now be faced with huge amounts of data that grows at a fast rate that could not have been predicted before. “ICT leaders, therefore, need to have business intelligence systems that are able to mine data in real time which should then help in decision making," says Andrew Waititu, general manager SAP.

John Jenkins, Group Executive from Business Connexion, an IT service outsourcing firm from South Africa thinks enterprises should take a “service on demand approach” to manage their IT operations. “Outsourcing cloud services from a secondary firm acts like a guardian vendor to deliver business value with technology to an enterprise”, says Jenkins.

According to Jenkins, 20% of businesses will not own hardware IT asset by 2012. Enterprises are shifting to a service hiring trend and IT outsourcing strategies will, therefore, enable business enterprises to achieve world class automation at low costs. "Organizations should not be locked by IT outsourcing firms who are not able to offer them with technology solutions that will cater for their future needs", warns Jenkins.

CIOs should position themselves at the strategy level of their businesses, understand services delivered by ICT then outsource them.

The conference attracted various local technology vendors, solution providers and business people and foreigners from Sri Lanka and Germany. Though according to Sean Moroney, 90% of the participants were from Kenya and other East African companies were not well represented as such. 30 mobile applications were showcased by Kenyan developers facilitated by Nokia.

Various topics for such as “Riding the Intelligent data wave”, “Role of international bandwidth in cloud computing”, “Practical framework of implementing cloud strategies”, “Using open data in mobile applications” and “The practicalities of cloud implementations”  will be covered on the second  day of the AITEC East Africa ICT summit, 3rd November 2011, at the Oshwal Center, Westlands, Nairobi.

You are welcome to visit us at the CIO East Africa booth.