Bob Koigi – KigaliTech

[Interview] Gerald Begumisa, Managing Director, Yo Uganda Limited

Yo Uganda Limited is a fintech company that is revolutionizing the payment landscape in East Africa. The Managing Director Gerald Begumisa discusses the firm’s model, partnership and plans to redefine the payments space in Africa.

You recently received the Payment System Operator License from Bank of Uganda. Tell us more about that and what it portends for You- Uganda?
The fintech space, or generally speaking, digital financial services have experienced tremendous growth in the last few years in Uganda. Thinking back from 2009 when the first mobile money service was introduced, there have been significant strides which have pushed the barriers and seen accelerated adoption of the services.

I would say that the fintech industry in Uganda has been fortunate to have had a permissive style of regulation which promoted and encouraged innovation, while at the same time providing guidelines and developing appropriate regulation. Financial services are fairy sensitive in any country, and with the great growth and adoption came the need to establish regulation to ensure that the services were being offered in a safe way which protects consumers and guarantees the integrity of the overall financial system.

Speaking for Yo!, we are very fortunate to have entered the market early (we were the first mobile payments aggregator in Uganda), and thus have has the opportunity to test various solutions and learn along the way. We expect that with the license we have, there shall be accelerated adoption of services since an oversight framework has now been put in place to ensure consumer protection and quality services.

Who are your clients?
We have a very wide range of customers, from the pharmacy around the corner, to supermarkets and some of the largest financial institutions in the country.

What do you consider your greatest selling points as a payment service provider?
We have greatly benefited from our ability to listen to what our customers, and potential customers are saying and act quickly to create solutions to solve their problems.

In 2010 you introduced the Payment Gateway service, Yo! Payments. How has the service evolved and what has been the market response?
The Yo! Payments Gateway was initially created to facilitate disbursement and collection of funds primarily through online channels i.e web.

Since then, it has since evolved to include access through mobile channels (mobile apps and USSD), banking integration, international remittances and a host of features.

The customers’ response has been remarkable as we carried out customizations to fit the various segments, essentially addressing their needs, and accelerating their uptake of our services.

How has COVID-19 affected your business?
Yo! has seen an increase in customers accepting online payments, which can be related to the fact that customers still had to find a method to keep their businesses running during the lock down. Customers who were previously sluggish about adopting online payments, now have began to view it as a mission critical component of their operation.

How is the financial inclusion situation like in Uganda and what is Yo-Uganda doing to enhance financial access especially among the unbanked and underbanked people?
In recent years, Ugandans’ access to financial services has dramatically increased, with a growing proportion of people owning a formal financial institution account which means individuals and businesses today have access to useful and inexpensive financial goods and services that fulfil their needs like credit, insurance, payments, savings and transactions that are offered responsibly and sustainably.

Yo! is therefore using this as an opportunity to actively alter the Ugandan ecosystem’s architecture by connecting conventional incumbents like banks and regulators with end-users like small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and thanks to the many technologies established, SMEs can also interact with one another in a seamless manner.

More to this, Yo! has partnered with various international organizations such as Mastercard and the United States African Development Foundation (USADF) to drive financial inclusion in agricultural value chains.

What is the greatest threat faced by the African payments industry?
The digital financial literacy gap between those who are and those who are not has accelerated and grown as a result of COVID-19, resulting in a growing competitive divide between firms and across industries, regions, and territories.

What in your opinion is the place of fintechs and payment system operators in driving economic growth in East Africa?
In my opinion, the place for fintechs and payment system operators is in creating, promoting and accelerating usage of a digital market place for various online products and services.

This is simply because they boost productivity, create economic opportunities, improve access to financial services thereby driving financial inclusion and reducing income inequality in East Africa.

How has regulation of the financial system in Uganda shaped the industry over the years?
In 2009, Uganda’s first mobile money service provider entered the market, quickly followed by ourselves, as Uganda’s first mobile money aggregator in 2011. Mobile Money Guidelines were announced in 2013, resulting in providing a loose framework to streamline operations of mobile money services.

The Financial Institutions Act of 2004 was amended in 2017 to add agent banking provisions, and the Data Protection and Privacy Act of 2019 was enacted in 2019. The National Payments Systems Act of 2020 was enacted in 2020, and the first fintech licenses were issued to ensure that both Fintechs and their consumers are safeguarded while conducting business, and creating a new regime of trust in fintech services.

What opportunities do you see in the digital finance space and how can African nations take advantage of them?
Through mergers and acquisitions, fintechs have a great opportunity to expand their digital footprint globally.

What are the growth plans for Yo Uganda?
Yo! aims to strengthen our current business strategy while also emphasizing the benefits of adopting our Yo! products and services, as well as international expansion.

Any latest news from your company?
We’re proud to announce a milestone in our partnership with Mastercard and the United States African Development Foundation (USADF) where we have on-boarded more than 200,000 farmers to the Mastercard Farmers Network (MFN) platform. We are excited about this achievement because we believe MFN, integrated with Yo! Payments provides a strong platform for digital inclusion, and we look forward to increased usage of our digital services in the agriculture sector, the largest contributor to Uganda’s GDP.

www.yo.co.ug

[Kenya] Payment option company Lipa Later selects Hotpoint as new retail partner

Lipa Later, a payment option that allows customers to purchase commodities through affordable monthly instalments has on-boarded Hotpoint as a new retail partner. Hotpoint appliances is Kenya’s premier supplier of Home Appliances and Electronics.

Hotpoint Appliances Ltd was established in 1984 with its first store located in the Sarit Centre shopping mall in Nairobi. Currently, they have 9 stores across Kenya and a fully-fledged online store selling a wide range of global brands including LG, Samsung, Bosch, Ariston, Kenwood, Delonghi, Nutribullet, Nutricook and their own Von offering consumers the global brands choice under one roof. Hotpoint Appliances have a range that includes TVs and Home Entertainment, Fridges and Freezers, Cookers and Ovens, Small Kitchen and Home Appliances, among others. Over the last year, they have introduced a range of customer aspirational experience products such as JBL, Apple, and Nikon in an endeavour to ensure that the consumer gets the very best of choice from them.

According to Lipa Later’s CEO, Eric Muli “We are always listening to our consumers’ needs and requests and strive to make sure we have the right partners for the different products our customers are seeking. We are very happy to be onboarding Hotpoint Appliances and the range of different household and electronic products they bring to the table.”

According to Research & Markets, the Kenya home appliances Market attained a value of USD 184.48 Million in 2018 which is expected to increase to USD 363.92 Million by the end of 2027 growing at a CAGR of 7.88%. The demand for home appliances in Kenya is increasing on account of significant rise in per capita disposable income coupled with an influx of high-end appliances in the country. Additionally, demand has been growing due to the significant growth in the working women population, driving the demand for appliances such as Washing machines and Refrigerators that make life easier.

www.lipalater.com

Vodacom Business expands Cloud Connect offering to support business needs across Africa

The expansion of Africa’s digital economy is gaining momentum, with the potential to reach US$180 billion by 2025, about 5% of the continent’s gross domestic product, according to a recent report released by the International Finance Corporation and Google. To meet the increasing demand for digital services in Africa, Vodacom Business Africa has expanded its Cloud Connect offering across the continent.

Cloud Connect provides businesses with a secure, private, high performance, high availability connection to leading public cloud service providers, including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

“Africa is experiencing a boom in digitalisation. Combined with the disruptions of COVID-19, this is driving many organisations on the continent to seek out the benefits of cloud services. Our Cloud Connect services keep businesses securely connected while providing them with operational agility and access to essential data and software applications to enhance their performance now and into the future,” says Wale Odeyemi, Executive Head of Strategic Marketing at Vodacom Business Africa.

Meeting the needs of businesses today
As the pandemic has shown, businesses need to be able to adapt to market changes, and with speed, to avoid disruptions to continuity. To help with business agility, Cloud Connect clients are able to experience the same fast switch-on flexibility of public cloud with their own WAN/network. Bandwidth choice ranges from 50Mb to 1G depending on the cloud service provider, so clients can scale network capacity to maintain performance as business needs change.

The high-performance connectivity of Cloud Connect enables periodic data migration and replication for continuity, disaster recovery and retention. The low latency connectivity is also able to support key business applications, including storage, big data, development and interactive applications, fast and in a scalable manner. For example, large data sets are quickly transferable for big data computing applications, and huge media files are streamed in real-time to and from the cloud.

In addition, the consistent performance and reliability of Cloud Connect improves application response times, so businesses can use the cloud as an extension of their data centres. High availability with dual diverse connections to cloud data centres ensures redundancy and protection in the event of a network failure.

Cloud Connect is a managed service, giving businesses more time to focus on important activities, and IT resources can be utilised more effectively, in an organisation.

How does Cloud Connect work?
Vodacom Business Africa’s Cloud Connect offers a secure, private connection without the need to redesign existing large corporate networks or experience the traditional delay of dedicated connections to cloud provider data centres. Cloud Connect works seamlessly alongside the IP-VPN and other fixed connectivity products to give organisations a total ‘Ready Network’ solution.

The service directly integrates into the branch sites of a business and is not reliant on the internet. The cloud locations are integrated into the private WAN, effectively seen as another site on the IP-VPN. Different locations in the IP-VPN then share the connectivity to access resources in the cloud.

“We are experiencing an exciting transformational period in the enterprise landscape in Africa. As a leading connectivity provider on the continent, Vodacom Business Africa remains committed in supporting businesses to take advantage of our continent’s growing digital economy and recognise real return on investment on cloud technology. To this end, we continue to leverage our strategic partner networks to provide innovative products and services, affordably, seamlessly and securely to our clients,” concludes Odeyemi.

www.vodacombusiness.co.za

Banking malware threats surging as mobile banking increases, Nokia Threat Intelligence Report

The Nokia 2021 Threat Intelligence Report shows that banking malware threats are sharply increasing as cyber criminals target the rising popularity of mobile banking on smartphones, with plots aimed at stealing personal banking credentials and credit card information.

The report, based on data aggregated from network traffic monitored on more than 200 million devices globally where Nokia’s NetGuard Endpoint Security product is deployed, showed an 80%, year-on-year increase in the first half of the year in the number of new banking trojans, which also try to steal SMS messages containing one-time passwords.

“A significant amount of this activity is focused in Europe and Latin America, but this activity is continuously spread to other regions of the world,” according to the report. “Banking trojans use a variety of tricks to collect the information. These include capturing keystrokes, overlaying bank login screens with their own transparent overlay relaying captured information to the intended target, taking screen snapshots, and even accessing Google Authenticator codes.”

Banking malware has been targeted mainly at Android phones, for years the most targeted mobile device type for cyber criminals due to Android’s ubiquity and developer openness, with some banking trojans among the most successful malware attacks in 2021.

The Threat Intelligence Report says that most banking applications allow users to add a multi-factor authentication feature to their accounts to make it more difficult for cybercriminals to obtain personal information. Users are strongly recommended to avoid mobile banking from easily accessible public WiFi access points; and to use both multi-factor authentication when available and strong passwords, which avoid common personal details like birthdays.

The report also found that Covid-19 related malware incidents in residential networks have leveled off at 2.5% after a peak in December 2020 of 3.2%. This demonstrates that people are more aware of the threats posed by Covid-related cyber-attacks and are taking steps to secure their home working environment.

IoT botnets, a network of devices connected with malware, continue to grow in size and sophistication, due to the rising use of IoT devices, like “smart” refrigerators and video surveillance cameras. One known as Mozi, which uses a peer-to-peer command and control protocol, has been used to create botnets consisting of around 500,000 individual devices. Mozi actively scans the network and uses a suite of known vulnerabilities to exploit additional IoT devices. IoT botnets are responsible for 32% of the malware incidents detected by Nokia’s NetGuard Endpoint Security.

Kevin McNamee, Director of Nokia’s Threat Intelligence Center, said: “Cybersecurity threats only evolve and look for new opportunities, as shown by this year’s report. Banking trojans have dramatically increased over the last year as digital banking becomes more prevalent – and this is a trend we see continuing into the future which reinforces the need for better online practices and having robust endpoint security in place.”

www.nokia.com

Cloudmania targets 13 African countries with new offerings

Cloudmania, an exclusive provider of Cloud Partner Programmes in Africa, has opened its doors in 13 countries across the continent. The indirect provider focuses on partner building and enablement by giving resellers the ability to resell superior solutions by leveraging Cloudmania.

According to Winston Ritson, Chief Business Officer, Cloudmania, “We understand the growing need for cloud services and its vital role to ensure seamless collaboration between employees. Our extensive expertise will ensure that you are provided with the appropriate tools to assist your customers on their cloud migration journeys. Just as customers have transformed their business, partners have to transform and rely on a partner invested in their business “

Cloudmania aims to help businesses keep track of their data, performance and customers, and creates a single-pane view of the entire network. In addition, the programme is designed to increase workflow efficiency, lower operational costs, and most importantly, develop partnerships with resellers.

Cloudmania will assist partners’ profitability by supporting them with marketing, training and specialist advice. Using the programme’s communication channels, the team will source qualified and unqualified leads to help partners build their businesses. The offering is backed by superior world-class technology, equipping a reseller’s business with innovative cloud technology, enabling them to offer exceptional customer solutions.

All resellers will have access to a suite of solutions tailored to suit customers’ needs. The products include Microsoft 365, One Voice – a unified voice solution, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Azure in a box, Cyber Security, cloud connectivity, cloud infrastructure, Google workspace, Windows virtual desktop and Basekit site builder.

Cloudmania will assist in boosting the performance of a reseller offering while ensuring affordability, scalability, improving uptime, availability and provide seamless integration.

The offerings are supported by partner development managers in each country, a panel of experts and focused training programmes. Resellers engaging with the Cloudmania will also benefit from in-country billing in specific territories and reseller discounts.

Cloudmania and its suite of offerings is currently available in South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Cameroon, Botswana and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

www.liquid.tech

Google Cloud announced Google Distributed Cloud during Google Next ‘21 virtual event

What does this mean?

In simple layman’s terms a customer can now have some Google Cloud services running some certified hardware and software either in their data centers with full autonomy or colocation data centers.

Google Cloud’s simplified preferred definition of Google Distributed Cloud, is a portfolio of solutions consisting of hardware and software that extend Google Cloud infrastructure to the edge and into your data centers.

Where can Google Distributed Cloud be deployed to?

1. Google’s network edge – Allowing customers to leverage over 140+ Google network edge locations around the world.

2. Operator edge – Enabling customers to take advantage of an operator’s edge network and benefit from 5G/LTE services offered by our leading communication service provider (CSP) partners. The operator edge is optimized to support low-latency use cases, running edge applications with stringent latency and bandwidth requirements.

3. Customer edge – Supporting customer-owned edge or remote locations such as retail stores, factory floors, or branch offices, which require localized compute and processing directly in the edge locations.

4. Customer data centers – Supporting customer-owned data centers and colocation facilities to address strict data security and privacy requirements, and to modernize on-premises deployments while meeting regulatory compliance.

What Google Cloud services are running on Google Distributed Cloud?

Google Distributed Cloud is enabled by Anthos. It helps you to build and run applications on GKE clusters and virtual machines anywhere with a Cloud-backed control plane for consistent management at scale.

Compute Services:

● Compute Instances

● Serverless Containers

● Kubernetes Engine

● Serverless Functions

Storage Services:

● Object Storage

● Istio Service Mesh

Continuous Integration Services:

● Build (from Cloud Build)

● Deploy (from Cloud Deploy)

● Artifact Registry

Developer Tools:

● IDE plugins

● Cloud SDK

APIs Services:

● API Gateway

● Apache Kafka (Partner-provided services)

● Kubernetes Engine

● Serverless Functions

Security Services:

● Key Management Service

● HashiCorp Vault (Partner-provided services)

● Identity Aware Proxy

Data and Analytics Services:

● PostgreSQL Database

● Elasticsearch Service (Partner-provided services)

● MongoDB Database (Partner-provided services)

● Redis Data Store (Partner-provided services)

● Event Streaming

● Data Lake Storage

AI/ML Services:

● Speech-to-Text

● Language Translation

● Machine Learning Platform

● Video Content Analysis

● Text-to-Speech

● Image Insights

Observability Services:

● Loggin

● Prometheus (Partner-provided services)

● Grafana (Partner-provided services)

● Splunk (Partner-provided services)

Will Google Distributed Cloud make management of the hardware and software harder for me and my organization?

No. Google Distributed Cloud is a fully-managed integrated hardware and software solution, meaning you don’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure and can focus on your application and business initiatives. Google Cloud aims to simplify operations leveraging Google’s expertise and track record in areas like skill deployment fleet management and site reliability engineering. This allows you to focus on your business priorities and leave the complexities to Google Cloud.

Wil this meet our data sovereignty needs?

Yes. Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) enables customers to have a full spectrum of control.

Data Sovereignty (Keep data within the sovereign cloud): Data is allocated on your premise and under the control; No data transferred outside of your isolated environment.

Operational Sovereignty (Fully control your own platform): Operated independently of Google Cloud and global networks.Can be operated by customer directly or a trusted partner, on dedicated networks and with local control plane.

Software Sovereignty (Cloud as a trusted local service): Google Cloud’s open core and open API helps reduce vendor risk and enable operational and software continuity even in black swan events. The benefits of cloud are delivered locally.

Will I need to have my Google Distributed Cloud on premise connected to Google Cloud?

No. Google Distributed Cloud includes a hosted mode to run sensitive workloads. Hosted mode helps you meet sovereignty needs by addressing data residency with strict security and privacy requirements all while providing you with a way to modernize on-premise deployments. Customers can manage this directly or host through a designated and trusted partner. This will not require connectivity to Google Cloud at any time to manage infrastructure and uses a local control plane for operations. Upgrades and patches are offered by Google and verified by the trusted partner.

References

How to extend Google Cloud services with Google Distributed Cloud – Hosted Mode

Driving transformation with Google’s Distributed Cloud

With over 10 years of proven expertise in technical consultation and related services, Incentro, the only Google Premier Partner in East, West and Central Africa has become the go-to partner for successful business transformation in the continent.

From Enterprise Collaboration, Cloud Migration and Smart Application Development, we proudly serve over 26 countries in Africa and are growing. Whatever your ambition is, we’ll aim for maximum impact. We dive deep into your organization, challenge your plans, build solutions swiftly and make sure they work.

Matthew Munyiri is the Online Marketeer at Incentro Africa. He is an ambassador for cloud and consumer technology and how it pertains to increased efficiency and productivity in the workplace. Want to know more? Get in contact with Matthew – matthew.munyiri@incentro.com.

www.incentro.com

cloud.google.com

afriQloud and whitesky.cloud have put the foundation in place for a federated EMEA cloud infrastructure

In partnership with the European company whitesky.cloud, afriQloud has designed a completely new architecture for affordable and local cloud services.

In the ever-expanding international cloud market, the partners from both the African and European continent introduce a completely new and compelling value proposition to the cloud industry. Thanks to their white-labelled platform, any organisation can become a Virtual Cloud Operator (VCO) offering cloud infrastructure through their own brand.

Extensive research identified the most important pain points channel partners and end users experience with the large and dominant hyperscalers. One of the most important pain points is the issue of data sovereignty. The partners decided to use principles well-known in the world of telecom (wholesale and roaming) to design a scalable and federated global cloud grid in order to resolve this and other pain points

“Distributed cloud capacity provides excellent opportunities for African organisations as well as international companies seeking to bring their digital services to the African continent,” explains Eric Mugerwa, Founding Partner and CTO of afriQloud.

Any interested party (telecom operators, system integrators, managed service providers, software developers, etc.) can now easily become a Virtual Cloud Operator (VCO). Both afriQloud and whitesky.cloud provide a fully managed solution, including a certified training programme which enables channel partners to sell and deliver cloud capacity on both continents.

“It’s exciting for us to be part of this solution, which provides an interesting opportunity for channel partners in both Europe and Africa. We enable them to provide cloud services on both continents from the day they decide to become a VCO,” says Jeroen van Langenhove, Managing Director of whitesky.cloud.

www.afriqloud.com

www.whitesky.cloud

[Column] James Bayhack: How mobile service cloud can transform customer experience

Service, service, service. That’s been the call for businesses that want to keep their clients happy and turn one-time customers into lifelong fans. Now, however, the focus has moved to brilliant customer experience. But what does this mean? And why are we seeing the shift?

Think about how you do business today compared to just a few years ago. Customer service was measured by metrics like how many rings there were before your service department answered. In addition, were your retail staff smiling and pleasant, and did your team respond to a customer email timeously? While customer service is still crucial, there’s a lot more to it in today’s multilayered, omnichannel world of business.

What is Customer Experience (CX)?

Customer experience is how your customers perceive their interactions with your company or brand.

From navigating the website to contacting customer service and receiving the product that they ordered, customer experience is the sum of every interaction the customer has with your company. It impacts their feelings and emotions, encompassing their entire customer journey. It also determines whether or not they come back.

A recent report by integrated customer experience company Ajua found that 81% of Kenyan companies with strong capabilities for delivering customer experience are outperforming their competition. By contrast, 91% of customers will not do business with a company a second time if their first experience is negative.

Findings also suggested that certain industries have upped their CX game and are experiencing growth even in a pandemic. These include banking, insurance, retail, and food and beverage. In the Telco space, Safaricom ranked top in terms of customer experience.

So, some companies are getting it right. Now, the question is, how can you do the same? With such a broad range of expectations, how can you narrow down the most critical factors and eliminate friction where it matters most? You’ll be thrilled to know we’ve done the heavy lifting for you and the easiest solution lies in mobile service cloud.

Here’s how this smart technology helps to solve the most common customer issues.

Creating bulletproof CX in 6 key steps

Omnichannel Inbox

In a single, convenient inbox, you can manage conversations from all channels. This solves the issue of long wait times when customers have a problem or question as it places all communication in one place for easy reference and super-fast response.

It’s common for many customers to conduct research before purchasing something from your company, and checking different platforms is one way of doing this. Whether they trust you or not depends on the quality of information they find and your responses along the way.

An omnichannel inbox allows you to deliver a brilliant customer experience on all channels. Don’t you agree that it looks unprofessional if you respond quickly via live chat but not at all via Facebook? When customers receive excellent service, they will tell their colleagues and friends about it.

Communication Stream

It’s important to communicate with customers wherever they feel comfortable and wherever they are likely to be.

Remember, CX is built on the somewhat fickle foundation of customer perception. What makes one person irate may not bother another, so it makes sense to cover all bases. Communication can make or break your CX. Lengthy delays, inefficient processes, or insufficient access to information will have your customers rolling their eyes in frustration.

Customer experience is about strengthening relationships with customers and building bonds through the use of technology.

Chatbots

It used to be considered bad form to chat with a customer via text or any automated platform, but today it’s the norm. In fact, it’s expected.

Streamline repetitive tasks by automating them. Our system allows you to create your own chatbot to automate conversations and implement quick replies. Your team can serve customers better and more efficiently if you make service easier and faster for them, without weighing them down with unnecessary and unproductive conversations.

Chatbots can reflect the personality of your brand, answer FAQs, and direct customers to where they need to be. Fast. A super-efficient addition to your customer service team, they don’t require sleep so they’re even more perfect for those after-hours shoppers. Your customers will benefit from swift response times for quick questions or enjoy assistance from stress-free and focused staff.

Team Collaboration

The problem of disjointed communication between internal and external teams ends here, as do many customer frustrations.

Remote employees, global time differences, and communication with external parties can get messy and negatively impact your SLAs. And really, your internal communication choices shouldn’t impact your customer’s experience, should they?

Mobile service cloud alleviates this problem by bringing all players together in one place, allowing conversations to be automatically assigned based on skills, or snoozing conversations as needed. It’s like putting everyone in the same room at the same time, relegating forgotten messages or misplaced communication to a thing of the past.

Customer Profile

Develop customer profiles based on data from your CRM or Customer Data Platform. The integration of systems enables you to provide customers with a quicker, more personal service experience.

Data can be displayed right next to the customer’s questions, so there’s no need to search across multiple systems. Improve customer profiles by including all available data and getting more insights about customer impact.

This key area grants your team the information they need to assist a customer, no matter what platform they come from. All data is immediately available to all employees no matter where they are, which, let’s face it, makes you look good!

Statistics

Customers are the lifeblood of a business. This is why corporations are concentrating on how to develop new business and, importantly, retain existing customers. However, if you don’t know where a problem lies, you won’t know how to fix it.

Identifying and addressing customer issues can be prevented by using reporting tools that uncover metrics that directly impact your business. Other vital statistics such as ‘response time’ or ‘availability’ highlight how your team is coping with their responsibilities and where improvements can be made. The data in these reports is invaluable to improving customer experience and deep-diving into customer experience metrics.

As effective as your management team may be, they can’t be omnipresent. But having real-time access to your channels, your team, business partners, and any other stakeholders you care to track gives you information worth its weight in gold.

Boost customer service today!

Businesses that adopt a customer experience strategy enjoy success in key areas: their churn rates are reduced, they increase brand loyalty, and revenues are increased. Surely those advantages are worth exploring?

Ultimately, good customer experiences are the most effective form of marketing with the highest ROI. Successful businesses are simply those with happy customers.

ames Bayhack is the Director of sub-Saharan Africa at CM.com

Oracle expands global cloud footprint to meet continued triple-digit growth

Oracle has announced plans to expand its cloud region footprint to support strong customer demand for Oracle Cloud services worldwide.

Over the next year, Oracle will open 14 cloud regions with new locations across Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Upcoming cloud regions include Milan (Italy), Stockholm (Sweden), Marseille (France), Spain, Singapore (Singapore), Johannesburg (South Africa), Jerusalem (Israel), Mexico, and Colombia.

Additional second regions will open in Abu Dhabi (U.A.E.), Saudi Arabia, France, Israel, and Chile. Oracle plans to have at least 44 cloud regions by the end of 2022, continuing one of the fastest expansions of any major cloud provider.

Oracle provides a broad and consistent set of cloud services across 30 commercial and government cloud regions in 14 countries on five continents to serve its growing global customer base. OCI currently operates 23 commercial regions and seven government regions, in addition to multiple dedicated and national security regions.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has seen stellar growth over the past year,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “We’ve introduced several hundred new cloud services and features and are continuing to see organizations from around the world increasingly turn to OCI to run their most mission-critical workloads in the cloud. With the additional Cloud regions, even more organizations will be able to use our cloud services to support their growth and overall success.”

To help customers build true business continuity and disaster protection, while helping them address their in-country data residence requirements, Oracle plans to establish at least two cloud regions in almost every country where it operates. The U.S., Canada, U.K., South Korea, Japan, Brazil, India, and Australia already have two cloud regions.

Oracle’s strategy is to meet customers where they are, enabling customers to keep data and services where they need it. Customers can deploy Oracle Cloud completely within their own data centers with Dedicated Region and Exadata Cloud@Customer, deploy cloud services locally with public cloud-based management, or deploy cloud services remotely on the edge with Roving Edge Infrastructure.

High Availability, Disaster Protection, and Dual Region Cloud Strategy

OCI’s next-generation architecture provides a high-performing, resilient foundation for cloud services, while its physical and virtual network design maximizes performance and security. For example, each Oracle Cloud region contains at least three fault domains, which are groupings of hardware that form logical data centers for high availability and resilience to hardware and network failures. Some regions (Ashburn, Phoenix, Frankfurt, and London) provide further resilience to entire data centers through multiple availability domains (ADs), which each contain three fault domains.

For business continuity and compliance requirements, Oracle’s unique dual-region cloud strategy enables customers to deploy resilient applications in multiple geographically separated locations—without having sensitive data leave the country. To help customers plan data center deployments to meet application requirements and optimize their cloud infrastructure, OCI’s provides a no cost inter-region latency dashboard that provides insights into real-time and historical latency for Oracle Cloud regions around the globe.

Sustainability

Oracle is committed to sustainability and has pledged to power all Oracle Cloud regions worldwide with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025.

Several Oracle Cloud regions, including regions in North America, South America, and Europe are already powered by 100 percent renewable energy, and all Oracle Cloud regions use state-of-the-art energy management and cooling technologies to minimize their impact on the environment.

As part of its renewable energy clean Cloud initiative, Oracle reused or recycled 99.6 percent of its retired hardware in FY21 while strictly adhering to Oracle’s data privacy and security practices.

Cloud Regions Deliver All Cloud Services and Multicloud

Oracle Cloud regions support every Oracle service and feature and are available to customers anywhere in the world. This includes Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud VMware solution, and Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications.

OCI’s extensive network of more than 70 FastConnect global and regional partners offer customers dedicated connectivity to Oracle Cloud regions and OCI services—providing customers with the best options anywhere in the world. FastConnect provides an easy, elastic, and economical way to create a dedicated and private network connection with higher bandwidth, lower latency, and more consistent performance versus public Internet-based connections.

In addition, OCI and Microsoft Azure have a strategic partnership that enables joint customers to run workloads across the two clouds. This partnership provides a low latency, cross-cloud interconnect between OCI and Azure in eight regions (Ashburn, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, San Jose, Vinhedo and Frankfurt), federated identity for joint customers to deploy applications across both clouds, and a collaborative support model. Customers can run full stack applications in a multi-cloud configuration, while maintaining high-performance connectivity without requiring re-architecture.

They can also migrate existing applications or develop cloud native applications that use a mix of OCI and Azure services.

www.oracle.com

Nokia and ATU to speed up digital transformation and the knowledge economy in Africa

Nokia has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the African Telecommunications Union (ATU) to drive digital transformation and the knowledge economy for socio-economic development across the continent.

The two parties will leverage the power of telecommunications, including 5G networks, to connect the unconnected and identify innovative use cases, as well as business models.

In addition, the MoU will lay ground for both organizations to better help governments shape telecom policy, develop talent and promote inclusion and diversity. This includes women, as well as the underprivileged in both rural and urban areas.

The MoU was signed in Nairobi, Kenya, by John OMO, Secretary General at ATU and Rajiv Aggarwal, Nokia Representative and Head of Central, East and West Africa Market Unit at Nokia.

Announcing the partnership, Rajiv Aggarwal, Head of Central, East and West Africa Market Unit at Nokia, said: “We remain keen on supporting Africa’s digital transformation journey and by collaborating with the ATU, we strengthen this commitment. We will leverage our global technology expertise and insights on policy matters to positively impact the universal socio-economic development in the continent.”

Co-signing the MoU with Mr. Rajiv, John OMO, Secretary General of the African Telecommunications Union (ATU), said: “Our vision is to make Africa a full and active participant in the global information and knowledge society by enabling universal access to ICT systems and services across Africa. Collaboration with a global industry leader such as Nokia is therefore crucial in this regard and will help us accelerate towards a digital transformation and knowledge economy.”
The MoU framework is guided by six tenets designed to facilitate this acceleration. These are:
•   Sharing of best practices on telecom technology trends and developments
•   Identification of innovative industrial use cases toward the Fourth Industrial Revolution
•   Recommendation on implementation of emerging technologies and business models
•   Promotion of connecting the unconnected with broadband
•   Development of emerging talent for digital innovation
•   Promotion of inclusion and diversity

Nokia has a long history of collaboration with international organizations and bodies across the globe. Regionally in MEA, Nokia recently partnered with UN Women to promote inclusion and diversity in Middle East and Africa.

Nokia is also working with UNICEF as part of a shared-value partnership in Kenya to connect schools with broadband and empower children in rural as well as disadvantaged urban areas.

In November 2020, Nokia supported the Forge Academy in South-Africa with the launch of a fully inclusive artificial intelligence (AI) laboratory to help students to become entrepreneurs in the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the global digital economy.

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