Johannesburg, 23 Mar 2011
Cisco has rolled out purpose-built unified communications solutions for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in order to boost skills development and increase ROI.
According to the company, this forms part of its Borderless Networks strategy to provide the SME market with affordable, business-class collaboration systems to help drive productivity and profitability.
Dr Cherif Sleiman, senior director for Africa, Cisco Enterprise and technology architecture, says the networking company is making big investments into skills development in the local SME market.
Sleiman says: “Video is no longer limited to large organisations. The Tandberg acquisition allowed Cisco to bring its video portfolio down to the SME and consumer space.”
Cisco is working with global cloud and service providers to deliver services where telepresence solutions can either be hosted in the cloud or hosted on premise.
“Cloud-based solutions are going to drive business economy by offering affordable services as SMEs can leverage Web collaboration and video to reduce cost and improve productivity.”
He says Cisco has identified Africa as a key growth market for unified communications. Despite restrictive bandwidth across the continent, Sleiman notes that broadband costs will come down; which will result in cheaper telepresence operating costs.
“We've been working with Main One, and we found that all the operators are keen to leverage these cables. And these cables pass through 34 costal cities, with each city having a two million population. This will bring rise to bandwidth and make telepresence available to the middle class in Africa.”
Kara Wilson: Cisco vice-president of collaboration solutions marketing says telepresence will drive skills development in Africa by enabling business to collaborate with IT experts all over the globe via video.
Wilson says: “The average age of the technology engineer in SA is 54. This means SA has six years left until those skills need to be replaced. SA has advanced skills in science and healthcare but fallen behind in IT.”
According to Michel de Beauregard, Tandberg sales business development manager, video will be able to bridge the digital divide by bringing education to those living in rural areas and to those who cannot travel.
“One of the true values of video is that it speeds up the development of the economy,” says De Beauregard. “We believe that video implementation will have the same effect as the speed of acceleration of the mobile telephony sector.”
He points to Cisco's telemedicine practice in SA, saying: “We've outfitted a vehicle with modalities for radiology and it has telepresence technology. The vehicle is able to go to remote areas where a doctor can speak to communities.”
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