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Business Deal to Put Continent On the Cloud
Jun 20, 2010 (MediaGlobal/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) --
The average American waits less than a second for Google to respond to a search query. In most of Africa, it takes three seconds to do the same thing. This two-second difference may not seem a drastic, but such a delay typifies the gap between Internet use in Africa and other parts of the world.
Despite slow connection speed, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization estimates the number of internet users in Africa has grown an astounding 1,809.8 percent in the past decade; this is almost three times the combined rate of the rest of the world. Despite this increase, only 3.9 percent of Africa's population uses the Internet.
In attempt to bring the rest of the continent online, technology companies Novell and Vodacom are partnering in order to expand cloud infrastructure to Africa. Unlike older mainframe technology, cloud computing provides a new delivery method for information technology (IT) services through the Internet.
John Savingeau, President of Pacific-Tier Communications and presenter at this year's Digital Africa Summit in Uganda believes the effects of bringing the cloud to Africa could change the continent's relations with the world at large.
"Wireless and broadband communication capacity potentially brings access to global communities and intellectual resources to each and every person in Africa," says Savageau, "Without an entry point into the global community, no individual can expect to function as other than a victim or donor recipient."
Anchored in virtualized resources, cloud computing is far more scalable and accessible than older client-server methods of the past. While on-site servers are a distant memory for many US workplaces, they are still the best available Internet technologies in many developing nations.
The partnership between the two companies to bring cloud infrastructure to Africa was first announced at Novell's BrainShare Europe conference in Amsterdam in May. Integrating parts of Novell's intelligent Workload Management portfolio to Vodacom-owned cloud infrastructure, the partnership is aimed at helping Africa's businesses make the move to the cloud.
Cloud computing will allow businesses in Africa to access more efficent work management systems and thus take advantage of more advanced internet services like Google's Gmail, an e-mail system that is commonplace in the US. Systems like these offer many cost benefits for companies as they often streamline services.
Vodacom and Novell's partnership is their second on the continent. Their first collaboration, BasisOne, brought together Novell's security platforms and Vodacom's private cloud systems to help optimize internet use for South African businesses.
According to Bilel Jamoussi, Chief of the Study Groups Department for the UN's International Telecommunication Union, cloud computing has many positive implications for Africa's public sector in Africa as well.
"Without computing access cloud computing is difficult if not impossible. Broadband is the prerequisite for all cloud computing, electricity- these are the basics," Jamoussi said in an interview with MediaGlobal. For many governments this is the impetus to build and put those systems in place and it leads to development with benefits beyond the business deal itself."
One group working to apply the benefits of cloud computing to education is UConnect. Seeking to improve the quality of e-learning technology in Uganda, the group is working to place computer stations schools throughout the country. Daniel Stern, co-founder and Director of UConnect's School Programs believes the technology gap puts students and teachers at a disadvantage.
"The vast majority of students in Uganda are still copying into lined notebooks from the knowledge disseminated to them by their teachers by a piece of chalk on a blackboard. Text books are in short supply."
Stern says even with UConnect supplying computers, many schools are still unable to connect to the Internet and thus keeps them from accessing resources like digital textbooks and web streamed lectures.
"We [UConnect] had expectations that education ministry officials would support the spread of these repositories at the limited number of schools that have both mains electricity and computers, but this has so far not happened."
Strengthening the relationship between government and business has been a major objective of ITU. "Partnerships with the private sector often mean that the public benefits as well. In Rwanda, we knew that we couldn't bring in the systems and not the training. So we have partnered with universities to sponsor programs in IT training," Jamoussi told MediaGlobal. "We know the education is necessary and that knowledge stays in the country then forever. If courses in their own universities can provide that training then the country benefits in the long term."
According to an Information and Communications Development 2009 report from the World Bank, for every 10 percent increase in high speed Internet usage, African countries have seen a 1.3 percent increase in their GDPs.
"Cloud computing can extend centrally managed government, education, business, and social resources to end users - regardless of their location of physical access device," said Savageau to MediaGlobal.
"The user simply needs to have a method of accessing the global Internet, and once online, enjoy equal access...from Kampala, Palos Verdes, Danang, or any other location in the world."
Novell and Vodacom's goal is to have the entire continent "under the cloud" by 2015. If this happens, we will be looking at a different future not only for Africa and the World Wide Web, but the world at large.
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