Showcasing its latest products and services portfolio of unified communications solutions, Cisco announced a strong focus on converged applications enabling voice, data, connectivity and social networking through social software platforms and IP-based applications.
ITNewsAfrica interviewed Joe Burton, Vice President and CTO of Voice Technology Group at Cisco, to find out what would be the impact of these unified communications solutions on the African continent and Cisco’s challenges in the African ICT market.
ITNewsAfrica.com: To what extent is Africa embracing unified communications and what is Cisco’s strategy in this regard?
Joe Burton, Cisco: It’s actually quite fascinating. We are seeing African people adopting unified communications at two levels. There is the basic level with IP communications provided by IP phones as a cheaper, more efficient way of doing phone calls. That is the piece that always seems to get embraced first, from our customers across many African countries, especially outside South Africa.
South Africa probably has more in common with US, Europe than many parts of Africa. The higher levels, supporting business process acceleration with instant calling, messaging, escalating video calls, is starting to catch up. Right now though I would say the majority are using them as a way of effective communication system and we are starting to see some interest in the full collaborative experience.
ITNewsAfrica.com: In some African countries, the adoption of VoIP is slowed by governments’ decision to keep the existing technology infrastructure in which they have invested. What is Cisco doing to promote VoIP and other IP-based technologies on the continent?
Joe Burton, Cisco: In some countries, VoIP is adopted slower because of the regulatory requirements, government is trying to protect the incumbent telephone carrier. In many cases, those telephone carriers might be Cisco’s customers too. 28% of Cisco’s revenues is actually from those service providers, building out the equipment.
What we are trying to do is to work both with the operator and the government to help them understand the new business models, the new services they can offer around VoIP, how these services can be a new revenue stream for them and add value in the countries they serve.
ITNewsAfrica.com: Are Cisco’s telepresence and video solutions adapted to the African market, given the fact the bandwidth speed and performance is not always reliable in this region?
Joe Burton, Cisco: We are aware that we need to build solutions for the problems we have today. For example, high definition telepresence will work well in South Africa but not as great in the interior of the continent. However, the inter-company media engine we have created, allowing telephone and video conversations over the Internet, can work on a very slow Internet connection. Telepresence works if a high definition video is needed, on the other hand we also have solutions for casual, low-definition video.
Even on telepresence, we are constantly working to reduce the requirements. Initially, telepresence required as much as six times more bandwidth than it requires today. I was doing here in South Africa a video call back to San Jose (US) for about four hours over a fairly weak Wi-Fi connection, incorporating, voice, video and web-sharing and it turned out very good. We can move from telepresence to lower levels based on a person’s needs and availability in the region.
ITNewsAfrica.com: Cisco launched social media software incorporating video, voice, instant messaging and networking capabilities on one platform. Will Cisco get into devices, similar to the iPad concept?
Joe Burton, Cisco: Cisco is very focused on creating devices that meet the needs of our customers and fit in the product and service range we have already developed. We are working on device-makers to be our first-rate customers and certainly we do listen to our customers, so if they desire for Cisco to get in a particular device market we would seriously consider it.
