African Tech Roundup

In this chat with Baba Zoumanigui, IBM's General Manager for French Speaking Africa, he shares insights drawn from his international IT career.

Baba gives us a sense of the lucrative value IBM is determined on unearthing in Africa and reflects candidly on what it takes for an African IT pro to navigate and thrive in a corporate scene dominated by Europeans and North Americans.

Rebecca Enonchong is an award-winning Cameroonian-born technology entrepreneur who is affectionately known as the "Queen of African Tech". Rebecca is the founder and CEO of AppsTech, and quite notably a co-founder and Vice-President of the African Business Angels Network (ABAN).

In this catch-up chat with Andile Masuku, Rebecca reflects on the #BringBackOurInternet campaign she continues to back, explains why she's annoyed by all the foreign aid money flooding Africa's tech scene and gives us a status update on her very public spat with MTN.

Shaun Kirby oversees product development for Cisco's automotive and connected car business unit. He is responsible for evangelising and acting on trends that will disrupt and transform the world's mobility industry. In this conversation, he explains why he's excited about IoT and talks about whether it's sensible to anticipate that Africa will leapfrog the traditional motor vehicle to adopt more advanced mobility options, this as the global trend towards ride-sharing and self-driving vehicle deployment continues.

Wolf Stinnes is smart buildings and digital cities solutions architect at Dimension Data. In this conversation, he talks about some clever top tier sport and health tech solutions that he and his team are beta testing and taking to market at the moment.

It's no secret, Africa's largest tech company by market cap, Naspers, has been buckling under the pressure to perform for some years now. The fact is, the company hasn't scored any big wins in any of the legacy internet and pay-TV verticals it once used to dominate with ease.

Naspers' most recent financial results seem to validate the notion that except for the firm's exceedingly lucrative 33 percent stake in the Chinese cash cow that is Tencent, there seems to be little else to write home about in terms of outstanding performance.

In this episode of the African Tech Round-up, Andile Masuku and Musa Kalenga discuss the merits of an open letter penned by a certain Albert Saporta - the managing director of the Geneva-based investment advisory firm and Naspers shareholder, AIM&R - accusing Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk of destroying approximately $25.6 billion of shareholder value since his appointment more than three years ago. Sniper!

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

John Lewis is the Director Business Partnering at Rockwell Automation. In this conversation with Andile Masuku, taped at the Internet of Things World Forum 2017 hosted at London's Tobacco Dock (creaking floorboards and all), John talks about how his company is adapting to changing times by drafting software developers and tech-savvy business specialists who can speak to the myriad of optimisation challenges faced by their clients all over the world. He also rebuffs the widely-held belief that the global trend towards aggressive factory automation is destroying livelihoods.

The Sub-Saharan Africa heads of the likes of Huawei, Oracle, Cisco, IBM and perhaps even Amazon, Facebook and Google, have no doubt already booked first class tickets to Lilongwe to advise the Malawian government on what to do with the $72.4 million line of credit the country has secured from the World Bank to "help Malawi build the digital foundations needed to help the country connect to the global digital economy". This development comes in the wake of the World Bank resuming "budget support financing" for Malawi in May 2017 after a four-year hiatus.

In this African Tech Round-up, Musa Kalenga and Andile Masuku discuss some of the things that Malawian policy-makers ought to prioritise as they engage with potential technology partners. News like this helps contextualise some of the sentiments expressed by David Meads, Cisco's Africa business head, in a recent IoT-focussed chat he had with Andile, in which he highlighted his organisation's commitment to assisting African governments with their digital transformation efforts.

Heads up... This episode was taped before Uber announced that Travis Kalanick would be stepping down as the company's CEO, so Andile and Musa didn't take that more recent piece of news into account when discussing Uber's travails.

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Anton Jooste is Dimension Data’s Global Director for the Internet of Things. In this chat, he contextualises the promise of IoT for African enterprises and citizens, and candidly outlines what's at stake if Africans don't prepare themselves to participate in the new digital economy.

Prathap Dendi is an engineer-turned startup executive with over 15 years of experience in technology leadership positions in companies ranging from startups to giants. He is currently the general manager for emerging technologies at the application performance management and IT operations analytics start-up AppDynamics, which Cisco recently acquired in the US for a whopping $3.7 billion.

Prathap hails from the South of India and in this conversation he shares insights regarding how technological innovation, not least IoT, might be wisely harnessed to deliver life-changing solutions to the world’s poorest populations.

David Meads has lead Cisco’s Operations across Africa since 2012 and is responsible for the company’s go-to-market strategy across the continent as well as the field execution of that strategy.

As Cisco’s VP for Africa, David is responsible for how Cisco partners with African Government’s and private sector companies alike to help them define and implement Digital strategies that will help them unlock the full potential of the "Internet of Everything".

In this conversation, David explains how his company hopes to ensure that the trend towards IoT adoption delivers value for the average African citizen.