With smartphone penetration in Africa growing by leaps and bounds, companies must deliver excellent mobile performance in order to grow. Business Connexion’s Sakkie Burger and Kamal Ravjee discuss why good infrastructure matters more than ever in delivering value to customers.
Africa’s IT landscape has changed dramatically in the last decade, mainly thanks to the proliferation of the smartphone. Currently, mobile penetration in South Africa is close to 100 percent, and about a third of these are smartphones.
Research firm Frost & Sullivan predicts that sub-Saharan Africa will experience the fastest growth in mobile usage globally. By 2016, the expectation is 160 million mobile broadband connections, which quadruples the 2012 stats.
Finding ways of adapting to this increasing mobility and using it as an engine for growth has become a high priority for most organisations. Business intelligence will play a big part in creating effective mobile strategies as companies engage in real-time data analytics of mobile data.
With phones and tablets featuring less storage capability than larger devices like laptops and computers, the rise of mobile devices is one of the factors that has contributed to the growth of the cloud. In such an environment, there is the temptation to understate the importance of hardware, but this is a dangerous misperception for enterprises.
As consumers are able to access greater amounts of information faster and more easily, their expectations have risen around speed, accessibility and convenience. Businesses need to be able to handle higher workloads of data to deliver fast response times and enable customer satisfaction at the user level.
More than ever, infrastructure matters as it provides the foundational capacity through which companies gain insight, enable omnichannel strategies and deliver greater value to their customers.
Current IT systems may not be able to handle the increased processing demands mobility will place on them. Companies need to begin investing in mainframes capable of handling high transaction volumes of data.
Business Connexion has always worked with vendors and suppliers that align with our strategy to enable customer engagement and drive business growth for our clients. As the world’s leading provider of cutting edge processing power, IBM is a natural partner of choice for us in implementing infrastructure that address the rise of the mobile generation.
As smartphones and tablets become even more of a presence in people’s lives, infrastructure will have to demonstrate even more outstanding processing power. According to the duo, the IBM z13 has been designed specifically to fulfil the transactional prerequisites businesses will need when interacting with the mobile generation.
The days in which server infrastructure had nothing to do with value creation are over. It’s a whole new world out there – one in which infrastructure works hand in hand with software solutions to solve new technological challenges and deliver smarter solutions.
Staff Writer
