"We have lots of people who do things technically but not enough people to show them how to organise these ideas into viable business models”. These were Kenya ICT Board CEO Paul Kukubo’s words during the opening of the just concluded Aitec East Africa ICT summit in Nairobi.According to Kukubo, ICT people already knew what to do and they did not need anyone to tell them that but needed an enabling business environment that would help them meet their business ends. This formed the focus of the ICT Board hence its support for efforts such as the Tandaa ICT grant for local digital content. Kukubo said that the Aitec conference helped various ICT stakeholders from the region to meet and facilitate business between them.

To reflect on the business environment challenges facing local ICT entrepreneurs, was Agosto Liko of Verviant consulting . Verviant consulting is a local ICT startup that has developed an electronic payment processing platform called Pesapal and processes a lot of work for clients worldwide including Samsung. Agosto mentioned the challenges Verviant underwent trying to get local venture capitalists(VC) before managing to get a foreign VC. First and foremost, Agosto says that most local VCs are actually middlemen who are looking to make a cut (or own a fraction of company shares) by acting links between real (mostly foreign) VCs and ICT innovators. Agosto also claims that most of the local VCs are wound up in red tape with a bureaucratic process involving lots of meetings and requirements before transactions take place. This results in most of the ICT entrepreneurs bootstrapping before they are able to make money by their own.

Most of the Internet 1.0 companies such as NairobiNet had either gone under or had been purchased by other companies. Internet 1.0 age consists of organizations formed in the early 2000's . This then led to the Mobile Network Operator age consisting mostly of mobile operators funded by foreign parent companies and a few internet operators that had gone ahead to receive VC funding. Internet 2.0 consisted of software organizations and more ISPs who are now mostly funded by VCs. 
Trust is the most important component of business. The country also faces a management crisis, according to Nick Nesbitt, the CEO of Kencall, a local Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company. Nesbitt got real on the operations of a BPO, explaining of how Kencall nearly got bankrupt resulting in delayed salaries to their employees and missed business deadlines. He says that the Kenyan workplace faces challenges where employees generally believe that all decisions made by top management are right because they are top management. He also mentioned that most businesses had a habit of giving excuses rather than delivering customer needs. He mad a comparison of outsourcing in India where the BPOs were quick to meet customer needs despite operating in a difficult environment considering physical infrastructure. Nick says that most of Bharti Airtel's success in India and in the future in Africa is due to massive outsourcing. Airtel is able to outsource at costs that Nesbitt says he previously would have laughed off as ridiculous.
At the same time, developers and Small and Medium Enterprises  (SMEs)  need to work together to meet client requirements. Caroline Juma from Kenya Computer Resources (KCR)  says that there have been situations where an outsourcing company or SME has received client demands that far outstrip what they can supply. Most of the organisations take up the work by themselves and end up not finishing it up on time. Juma says that Indian outsourcers face the same challenges, and have been able to overcome them by re-outsourcing tasks within each other having them done on time.

ICT businesses therefore need to be more sensitive to customer needs. "It does not matter what you did in the past for a client", says Balancing Act's Rusell Southwood. This was especially true in the mobile industry where customers were said to have a "thin skin of loyalty". Southwood says: "All operators wash whiter, but beneath there is little differentiation." With Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) falling below US$2  and the market quickly reaching saturation, operators need to focus on developing an open ecosystem. Southwood defines an open system as one where one can openly connect with another person. He also says that as a matter of fact, operators have never been keen on developing content. Africa also lacks bargaining power, such as that to specify handset design.  Therefore, the winning operators in the new world will be those who build ecosystems comprising content, applications and Operating system. The winer is operator who allows best ecosystem to flourish , not one who seeks to control everything. Southwood warns operators and ICT businesses that users are not interested in technology unless it does what they want to do.
The AITEC summit also saw a heated debate on the relevance of an African wide top level domain (.africa). DotConnectAfrica's Executive Director Sophia Bekele says that an African domain would give businesses better exposure worldwide compared to country domains, some of which are not known world wide. Bobby Yawe, an ICT consultant, on the other hand pointed out that we first needed to bring out the business sense in country level domian names rather than wave the patriotic flag. This would otherwise lose their relevance and remain as cyber-squatting  opportunities. Yawe says that here has been little appreciation for the dot ke domain with about 14,000 registered domains. 
Also taking centrestage at the conference was  the push for environmentally friendly businesses. Jyoti Mukherjee, the CEO of Software Technologies demonstrated the eHorizons eBoard, a software that promises to deliver a paperless board. Jyoti said that most company boards used an average of 300 reams annually printing board documents. There was also wastage as archived documents are never used , instead, people tended to reprint the document every time it is needed. eBoard stores all documents and does board meeting management. The software has also been made easy to install and use with little configuration and need for backing up from the client side. Jyoti says that eBoard can also be accessed online, and will be launched soon in partnership with the Nairobi Stock Exchange and Capital Markets Authority. 
Arlene Nazareth , APC's account manager for East Africa presented on how data centres could be re-built and designed better to use lesser energy in cooling. She says that power and cooling amounted to the highest category cost for running a data centre. Data centres are set to increase as internet use and online transactions continue to rise, with 800 billion internet commerce transactions expected by 2015.
Software as a Service (SaaS) presents several advantages, especially to Small and Medium Enterprises. Joseph Waruingi,CEO, Advantech Consulting says some of these advantages are such as wide availability, low management overheads, decentralization, pay-as-you -go usage and low maintenance costs. Waruingi demonstrated the Japan International Corporation Agency funded one stop border clearance system as an example of SaaS. The system allows cargo clearance to occur simultaneously at both sides of an international border. 
While the new constitution gives each Kenyan Citizen the right to access information held by the government, the same constitution also limited such rights and freedoms and also curtailed access based on sensitivity and personal privacy and national versus personal interests. This was brought out by John Sergon who is the acting ICT secretary, Directorate of e-Government.

Sergon says that there was a direct relationship between developed countries and the amount of freedom of information enjoyed in such countries. However , Sergon said that there were several cases pending in courts in several countries over whether individuals should be allowed to access certain information, and that Kenya should be prepared for this debate.