Africa cloud computing potential huge it wilderness

Africa, for example. Yes, Africa-a place where smartphones are said to be popular over the next 5 years will be the next market for the IT industry to compete and reap the rewards, and they will be used in mobile cloud to serve local consumers and businesses. At the same time, some Governments and non-governmental organizations will also improve local economic and social life through cloud services and promote development in education, public health and the environment.

Media_literacy_digest_georgesiemens_africa_technology, Africa has long been synonymous with poverty, disease and despair, and it is not easy to spread cloud technology here. The people who set up data centers in the area know better than anyone that this is going to be a breakdown: the cost of connecting to an overseas data centre from Africa is significantly lower than the cost of connecting to a local data centre; there is no fixed telephone, no cable network, and power transmission is unstable and suddenly a few hours of power is lost, Even a few days.

However, it may be that these particular challenges continue to attract the attention of it people. According to the World Bank, only 140 million of every 1 billion people in Africa use the Internet, but the number of people using mobile phones is already over 600 million. This is undoubtedly a huge potential market for mobile applications.

Speaking at the East Africa Outsourcing Service Summit held in Nairobi on June 6, Paul Kukubo, chief executive of the Kenya ICT (Information and Communications technology Administration), said:

"The world is beginning to focus on Africa, and if your IT products can solve Africa's problems, the product will be favored around the world." ”

Despite all the exceptions to the problem of universal cloud computing in Africa, local solutions are applied to global Internet and cloud services.

Upgrade broadband in recent years, broadband services in Africa have improved dramatically. Broadband was first introduced in Western Africa in 2001, when bandwidth was 340bps, but the cost of installing such a broadband was as high as $300,000/month, and astronomical broadband costs made local Internet development rather slow. Until a few years later, computers in many of the local universities were not networked.

Local networks improved in 2009 by erecting submarine cables. South Africa's regional bandwidth has increased to 8tb/seconds, but this has only reduced the cost of connecting local and overseas data centers, and the cost of local networking remains high. You install or not, broadband is there, the price is not low, not down. As long as you have the money, you can always connect.

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Another reason for the high cost of broadband is that the largest telecoms company in the country is a state-owned company and lacks strong competitors.

There is another problem with the broadband presence in Nairobi. As more and more IT companies are settled in, local broadband providers are competing fiercely. They have set up their own fiber optics to serve some rich areas. Rivals often cut out the other's fiber to blow the other's business. This vicious competition is harmful to the development of the Internet in the whole region.

Power issues Another big problem for cloud service providers in Africa is electricity supply. One of the most common things locals do is curse the grid company.

A South African data center provider says they have hundreds of diesel generators, often without electricity, and sometimes power off for three or four days without notice. In addition, insufficient capacitance also affected the construction of local data centers. Imagine how a data center would work in an environment where electricity was barren and power plants were dilapidated.

Demand for mobile clouds a severe lack of wired infrastructure in Africa is just the development of the market for cloud services. As mentioned earlier, the number of local mobile phone users is large and still growing, some mobile applications have even surpassed the United States, for example, in Kenya, the total number of mobile subscribers last year reached 8 million, equivalent to the total number of Kenyan adult population of 40%.

Wyse-cloud-teaser_new-300x240 from the economic and cultural two point of view, the development of mobile in Africa is far more than cable broadband have before/Qiantu. A World Bank study shows that Africa's mobile coverage is expected to reach 97% of its population without government subsidies.

Access to the Internet with rechargeable mobile devices is more practical for locals because of insufficient power supply.

In fact, the number of mobile subscribers in Africa has grown much faster than in areas where electricity is normally available. By 2015, 138 million of African mobile users will come from areas that lack power facilities.

Some non-governmental organizations and development agencies have also used cloud services as a tool to assist local economic and social development. For example, the U.S. State Department sponsored an application design challenge named Apps4africa, which last year won the application of a crop supply management system; The winner was an application of a mobile social and animal husbandry Information System (ICOW), which has now been used by 11,000 Kenyan farmers.

The lack of traditional cable networks may hamper many aspects of African society, but in the long run Africa has a great advantage in developing mobile apps and cloud computing.

A wilderness area full of potential

Africa's future is a mobile hub, and it will be a fertile ground for the growth of cloud computing. At present, the world has moved to the pace of mobility, the African people are among the main force. For the cloud service provider, to succeed in Africa, it must start with the real needs of the local, the services provided must be related to the user's life. It means that starving Africans have no time to pay attention to how many people on Facebook have powdered him, and a similar Icow farm service can get them.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)