and Machine Learning to get a leg-up on
traditional banks.
Companies in Africa can emerge from
a situation where they have had more
rudimentary applications and business
processes to where they have unleashed
the power of cloud technologies which
makes it easier and far more efficient to
automate services.
According to the IDC, overall spending on
ICT in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa
(META) is set to grow 2.5% year on year in
2019 to reach US$213 billion. Group Vice
President and Regional Managing Director
for the META region, Jyoti Lalchandani,
adds that progressively more organisations
experiment with emerging technologies
such as AI and the Internet of Things to
drive innovation and improve their customer
experience. He says that the most important
task facing the region’s decision makers
is the development of an effective Digital
Transformation platform that can sustain
and scale business operations.
CEOs and CIOs on the continent have
the cloud at the centre of their Digital
Transformation strategies, knowing full
well that without automation they will
either be out of business, or be steering an
organisation with flawed reporting. The
ability to harvest, store and sort big data is a
critical element of business competitiveness.
Business leaders are seeing first-hand how
the cloud is an enabler for innovation.
Oracle Cloud at Customer is designed to
enable organisations to remove one of the
biggest obstacles to cloud adoption – data
privacy concerns related to where the data
is stored.
In our experience, while organisations
are eager to move their enterprise
workloads to the public cloud, many have
been constrained by business, legislative
and regulatory requirements that have
prevented them from being able to adopt
the technology. Oracle Cloud at Customer
provides organisations with choice regarding
where their data and applications reside
and a natural path to eventually, and easily,
move business critical applications to the
public cloud.
Marketing Cloud has brought the authority
that much closer to achieving this. The end
result is collecting more revenue to drive
the development of the country, while also
empowering its staff to serve customers in a
digital era.
Digital Transformation has meant there
needs to be a coordinated approach to
addressing the skills shortage as well as the
risks that technological disruption is causing,
such as cybersecurity. We have put in place
numerous initiatives to help address this
challenge, with programmes across sub-
Saharan Africa, including Kenya, Nigeria and
South Africa.
On the continent, there is no illusion about the
importance of putting in place foundational
infrastructure, and various industries are
consolidating in order to tap into the power of
automation, AI, Machine Learning and more.
A traditional brick-and-mortar operation can
transform into a customer-focussed, smart,
reactive, relevant enterprise. In 2017, Oracle Academy and The Global
Peace Foundation of Kenya signed an
agreement that will allow our academy to
support 24 public high schools in Kenya. As
part of this, Oracle will train 180 teachers
over three years to start teaching our Oracle
Academy Java and Database courses.
Driving the focus towards closing the skills
gap is vital for big technology companies
such as Oracle.
The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA)
partnered with Oracle in order to solve
problems that had hampered the country’s
revenue collection. A cumbersome and
painful tax filing system meant the
compliance rate was terribly low. The KRA’s
vision is commitment to the concept of
customer centricity. The implementation
and rollout of iTax powered by Oracle Service
Cloud, Policy Automation, Social Cloud and A similar example is found in Nigeria,
where Oracle Academy has announced
a partnership with the Federal Ministry
of Education in that country, where the
ministry will introduce our Oracle Academy
computer science curriculum across 10,000
academic institutions, reaching one to five
million students. To complement this, the
Academy will facilitate the upskilling of
4,000 educators.
In South Africa, our Oracle Graduate
Leadership Programme, launched in 2014,
helps youths develop specialised IT skills
required to succeed in the Fourth Industrial
Revolution. The programme has delivered 84
graduates to date and creates a future skills
pipeline for our company and our partner
community in the region.
There must be action behind rhetoric.
Companies must put their visions and
strategy into action and together we will
unleash the immense potential of this
continent. There used to be a saying about
dreamers – ‘their head is in the clouds’.
How appropriate that the dream of a
technologically competitive Africa, which is
unfolding at a rapid pace and is not fantasy
but proven reality, also resides in the cloud. n
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