As the race for Kenyan companies to capture the growing pan African market opportunities hots up, Seven Seas Technologies (SST) a local integrated information technology services provider has moved to open a fully-fledged office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.In a press release, the firm says that they plan to invest more than Kshs 90 Million (USD 1Million) in its move to register a strong market presence in the fastest growing market within the horn of Africa region.Across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and now Ethiopia, SST is making a mark as the fastest growing indigenously owned IT services provider focusing on the provision of a wide portfolio of data centre solutions, managed services and infrastructure design solutions.

The firm’s move into the Ethiopian market is powered by a Joint Venture agreement between Seven Seas Technologies and Netcom Limited a local Ethiopian company. SST’s Ethiopian operations will be headed by Mr. Eyob Bekele a seasoned IT business professional with vast local and international experience.
Speaking in Addis Ababa, during the formal opening of the firm’s Horn of Africa regional office, SSTs founder and CEO Mr. Michael Macharia said the new office comes on board to spearhead the firm’s data business growth in the region.
While attributing his firm’s move to upgrade its former project office to a fully-fledged office to what he described as growing market opportunities, Macharia further disclosed that SST is on course to unveil a world class speciliased IT Training facility to fuel skills transfer programmes for the Ethiopian people.
“With the opening of our Addis office, SST is now very well positioned to provide end to end, turnkey solutions covering Business applications, Business Intelligence, customer Relationship Management, Core banking, Infrastructure solutions and related services for the Ethiopian market,” Macharia said.
SST’s move to Ethiopia comes hot on the heels of the firm’s recent certification by global IT solutions market leader CISCO as the Africa Service Provider Partner of the year 2011 and Cloud Computing giant VMware’s certification as the African partner of the year 2011.
During the launch event, Macharia assured scores of business leaders that SST’s opening in the region would provide a cost effective launch pad for private and public sector Ethiopian firms to embrace cutting edge IT solutions such as cloud computing and data center management solutions.
In Ethiopia, SST has previously landed multimillion deals to provide Information Technology solutions to Bank of Abyssinia, Awash Industrial Bank and Dashen Bank in Addis Ababa.

At Awash Industrial Bank, SST was instrumental in the design and deployment of solution providing connectivity inter-branch communication and connectivity to the banking applications at the headquarters and across its branch network in Ethiopia.  At Bank of Abyssinia, SST is currently rollin out a US$700,000 project to design, install and commission an ultra-modern data center at the Bank’s headquarters in Addis Ababa.