NETCB hosts tour to Open Horizons Summit 2014

Local networking specialists NETCB has announced that it will once again be hosting a tour to the Open Horizons 2014 Summit. The conference, for IT professionals focusing on Novell, NetIQ, SUSE and Partner solutions, will take place from 7 - 9 April in Budapest, Hungary.

The Open Horizons EMEA Summit 2014 addresses key elements of modern IT-Infrastructure, collaboration solutions and file management, device and endpoint management, and Linux server management.

NETCB CEO Cobus Burgers says the Open Horizons EMEA Summit is a must for any IT professional. "It's an opportunity to meet old friends and new experts on Novell solutions, since there is so much news to share and to discuss.”

“Visitors can get experience the most recent Novell releases and upcoming products like ZMM, Filr or Mobile iPrint. In the Collaboration space, they can also look forward to interesting roadmap conversations like the expected GroupWise 2014 release."

Along with the two keynote sessions, delegates can choose to attend 5 of more than 30 half-day hands-on practical hot-labs, delivered by a panel of technology experts from the Open Horizons community.

"There are some key market drivers in 2014 and beyond, which are very important to our customers and partners, that will be showcased. Starting with the mobility trend, the associated opportunities and risks, over the explosion of unstructured data and the critical need for a Data Governance strategy, to the new challenges in Application- and Device Lifecycle Management being driven by the new mobile diversity," he explains.

In this context, some keynotes will focus on the Novell approach to make existing infrastructures more agile and more mobile. In other words, how to leverage current investments and how to smoothly adapt them to needs and realities of today.

This conference is ideally for system administrators and engineers that want to gain a deeper technical knowledge and insight around these technologies, CIOs, IT directors and IT managers who want to have a better understanding on how these technologies can benefit their organisations in terms of performance and costs.

Furthermore, it is ideal for organisations and individuals that have no knowledge of these platforms and solutions and want to understand how the new technologies can benefit and improve performance and reduce costs within their current environments.

NETCB will be hosting affordable tours, departing from Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania. Seats are limited and registrations will close on 28 February 2014.

"The surroundings for the conference are second to none, a luxurious 4-star venue in the stunning city of Budapest on the banks of the river Danube. A destination with excellent travel connections," he concludes.

Making the journey into the Cloud

Taking organisations from reactive to innovative

Businesses today depend upon IT to drive innovation and accelerate past competitors. While each organisation may have its own unique definition of innovation, many of the elements remain common. This is according to NETCB’s CEO Cobus Burgers.

He says the goal is getting closer to customers to help deliver business goals, delivering more compelling services than key competitors and making an increasingly mobile workforce more productive and effective.

Maintaining existing IT systems consumes the majority of budgets, leaving little to reinvest in growing the business. That's why an increasing number of IT organisations leverage cloud technology to break this cycle and unlock resources to fuel innovation.

IT is further challenged by the need to deliver all of this more rapidly than ever and with tight budget constraints while still supporting service levels for performance, governance and security. To boost their responsiveness, businesses seek to complement their internal data centres with the agility and cost-effectiveness of a public cloud, which leverages existing investments.

Those organisations most successfully leveraging cloud technology have transformed two major areas of IT, the technology required to build a cloud infrastructure and the core operating model needed to gain the greatest benefit from this new technology foundation.

These businesses have embraced cloud as a cohesive strategy, examining how to build and operate or rent their cloud environments, while measuring the efficiency, agility and reliability improvements of cloud computing.

Burgers says across the African continent, successes are growing. “For many established businesses and new start-ups, IT has become a driving force for business results, unlocking vital revenue streams, rapidly capitalising on new business opportunities, disrupting markets and recasting competitive landscapes.”

“It has moved on from being a cost centre to become a clear strategic partner to the business, delivering clear value and differentiation – and aligning with key business objectives.

However other IT organisations are struggling to find this same kind of success. Burdened with brittle, siloed infrastructures and outdated approaches to systems management, they find themselves working hard just to support existing systems. With resources and budgets dedicated to maintaining the status quo, IT finds itself continually running to keep up with a growing backlog of requests from the business for new services.

Those caught in this reactive mode find it all but impossible to invest in the kinds of systems and services that would grow the business and deliver innovative new ways of operating. In these organisations, there is a growing tension between IT and the business.

Continued delays in delivering the services that drive revenue and operations are putting organisations at a serious competitive disadvantage. Line of business stakeholders, frustrated with IT’s ability to deliver the capabilities they require, often go out and acquire IT services and business applications themselves, outside of traditional IT procurement channels.

With attractive pricing and business models, and the benefit of self-service, on-demand access to services, line of business stakeholders often see public cloud and SaaS providers as a path to rapid innovation.

The truth is that there is a danger inherent in this kind of ad-hoc approach to IT delivery. While it may well offer an immediate solution to a pressing business challenge, this approach carries significant near and long-term risk with it as well.

IT cannot ensure that innovation happens in a way that concurrently protects the organisation. Public cloud providers have diverse, often unclear, standards for security, compliance and governance. Sensitive data can easily sit outside the business without robust, IT-led security measures.

The rush for action today to drive innovation creates tomorrow’s silos of technology. Creating multiple pools of disparately run and managed infrastructure limits IT’s ability to leverage common management environments, to drive automation or reduce OPEX.

Lack of portability across environments limits IT’s ability to migrate workloads to best manage cost, risk, and quality of service. This becomes particularly important as applications grow and play a more strategic role in the business, demanding significantly higher service levels.

Without embracing new models, IT organisations continue to be reactive: exhausting resources to support existing systems and failing to free up resources to deliver critical new business services.

Increasingly, IT is looking to cloud computing as a way to break this cycle. The aim? To form a new partnership with business stakeholders based upon the ability to deliver innovation and build business value.

Cloud empowers IT to redefine the way services are produced and delivered for the business. The goal isn’t to merely become a more efficient, reliable and agile IT organisation – although cloud certainly delivers that. Rather, the goal is to operate in a fundamentally different way – more flexible and responsive to business needs.

88mph opens applications in Nairobi

08.05.2013, Nairobi, Kenya

88mph, an early stage startup fund and 3 month accelerator program has opened applications for Nairobi. The program assists start-ups by giving them investment of up to a 100k, access to business networks and the know how to quickly grow their businesses. 88mph’s strategy in Africa is to fund strong teams and web-mobile ideas that have the ability to scale across English speaking Africa.

“There’s an immense opportunity to build mobile/web startups in Nairobi right now. African Mobile/web is hands down one of the fastest growing markets in the world and we want to reach out to entrepreneurs who build products and services for hundreds of million mobile/web users that are rapidly popping up on the continent,” says 88mph Program Director Nikolai Barnwell.

Barnwell continues,“Unfortunately, the natural course of a startup is to die before succeeding. But we provide the funding and the infrastructure to boost the odds of survival and we now want to look for the next batch of future successful entrepreneurs.”

That’s why, in addition to funding, the 88mph team in Nairobi has put together talent and resources, to add more value for the startups:

• A partnership with Google has enabled the right space and internet resources to build tech companies, as well as access to Google’s experienced web professionals who can mentor the startups.
• A host of highly experienced local Kenyans and global mentors have been added to the already top-notch 88mph mentor network.
• Furthermore, “Entrepreneurs-in-residence” – experienced entrepreneurs, specialized in sales, programming & web design - are being brought in from across the world to work side by side with the local startups during the 3-month acceleration.
• Finally, 88mph arranges a demo day, where the startups will get access to a group of investors and showcase what they’ve achieved so far.

Last year 88mph invested in 6 web-mobile startups in Nairobi. The 3-month program to accelerate the growth of the startups in Nairobi last year has reaped great rewards for the start-ups, with one startup with confirmed follow on funding and another two that are in final discussions. This will allow them to be able to scale their businesses across Africa successfully.

‘I've seen a wealth of talent infused in Nairobi within the past couple of years," says Carey Eaton, co-Founder, One Africa Media and CEO, Cheki Africa Media."88mph and the ecosystem brewing here are making a very significant contribution to building technology companies in the region to another level, building the next great wave of web and mobile businesses that solve African problems. I'm looking forward to following these startups closely throughout the program."

The speed at which the mobile internet has reached the markets of Africa, now at 274 million Africans on Edge or 3G, has created a huge demand for local applications and services catering to the young and growing middle classes of Africa. 88mph is here to fund start-ups wishing to grab a portion of this growing market. So far, they have invested over $750,000 into 23 early stage start-ups.

The combination of a large market, young population and opportunities within the mobile/web industry makes this accelerator attractive to any tech entrepreneurs who are looking to solve real challenges in Africa.

"Looking 2-5 years ahead, the US and Europe will be stagnating at best. I think the biggest opportunities for return on investment will be in Africa and other emerging markets. Our accelerator program is a great opportunity for international tech entrepreneurs and returning diaspora to come, take advantage of the insane growth here, and work on solving some really interesting problems," concludes Barnwell.

Ends.

Additional Information:

• Application deadline is midnight July 15th, 2013

• Startups can apply now on 88mph.ac

• 88mph invests up to $100k per startup

• Equity will depend on the startup company valuations, which could range from $100k to $1mil

• Altogether 8 - 15 teams will receive an investment and get accepted into the 3-month program

• The teams will be notified if they have been accepted to the program by August 1st, 2013

• Program starts on August 26^th at the 88mph Garage in Narobi, Kenya

• Startups in the program will have access to tech hubs in Cape Town, as well as to 88mph's partner tech hubs across Africa