IBM announced during its signature event in Lagos, ‘IBM Business Nigeria 2016’ that eight companies across Africa, spanning some of the fastest growing industries in the region, from telecommunications to retail, have chosen IBM to provide IT solutions delivered as a service via IBM Cloud. This will help the firms drive productivity, innovation, differentiation and competitiveness in their respective industries.

Located in various urban centers across the west, north, central and southern African regional economic zones, all businesses seek to use IBM public and hybrid cloud solutions to accelerate business development and innovation and create global growth strategies.

Companies including Navigation and Geocoding Technologies Ltd. (Naveo), Whogohost, Korrect Software, Serve Consulting, and IntTeck Global Systems, are all looking to the hybrid cloud for greater flexibility, scalability and central management. This will enable them to move workloads to where they make the most sense for their business.

These companies are not alone and their move to the hybrid cloud is indicative of a global trend. According to IDC, hybrid cloud is the new norm for businesses, and it predicts that more than 80 percent of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud architectures by 2017.

A 2016 global study of hybrid cloud, Growing up Hybrid: Accelerating Digital Transformation from the IBM Center for Applied Insights, found that 500 hybrid cloud implementers from 13 countries and 23 industries are using hybrid cloud to jumpstart “next-generation” initiatives.

“The IBM Cloud allows a company to improve business agility and capacity to quickly meet shifting customer demands,” said Tejas Mehta, general manager, IBM Central and West Africa.” He added,

“The Africa region is propelling innovation by adopting IBM Cloud. The IBM Cloud will give them the technical muscle to consistently align their operational objectives and assets with prevailing market conditions, laying a foundation for commercial sustenance and future growth.”

African companies adopting IBM hybrid cloud solutions:
Naveo: Located in Moka, on the island nation of Mauritius, Naveo specializes in fleet management solutions, providing tracking tools designed to help customers dispatch vehicles more effectively, improve worker performance and reduce operating costs.

Looking for the right skills to manage the IT environment needed to host its fleet-tracking and asset-tracking GPS solutions, improve operational performance and eliminate system downtime, the company migrated from its existing hosting platform to IBM’s hybrid cloud solution based on an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model.

As a result of the migration to the highly-scalable IBM Cloud, the company was able to develop and launch Naveo One, an all-in-one fleet management solution offering telematics, telemetry and geographic information system (GIS) capabilities. Naveo can now focus on marketing its GPS tracking application with assurance that the infrastructure will support its growth across the nations of the Indian Ocean Islands and Africa.

An Angolan distribution company markets and distributes food and non-food products in its domestic market via a network of hypermarkets, supermarkets and convenience stores.

The company managed its human resources (HR) operations manually, which was slow, time-consuming, labor-intensive and expensive.

The company wanted to automate all HR processes, including tracking attendance and absences, to gain better visibility into HR management.

By implementing IBM Business Process Manager Standard software, the company successfully automated its manual business procedures, improving efficiency and saving time. Time spent managing business processes have been reduced by 50 percent, freeing up more time for functional and strategic tasks for all operational and executive personnel.

Whogohost: A web services and hosting solutions provider in Nigeria, Whogohost has become one of the country’s leading hosting providers.

After suffering from hosting downtime that threatened the growing success of its business, Whogohost turned to IBM Cloud to deliver a robust, reliable and high performance cloud infrastructure that customers demand.

This has resulted in a high-quality service experience for its fast- expanding clientele. The company is now well known for consistently increasing up-time, as well as effectively and flexibly meeting customer demands.

An IT company in North Africa which specializes in domain registration, web development and web design and hosting services, has recorded consistent growth of its customer base, significantly improved business performance and service delivery levels since it adopted an IBM hybrid cloud infrastructure.

This allowed the company’s enterprise customers to migrate from traditional dedicated servers to the cloud.

The aim was to help these businesses maintain high performance for their cloud solutions while providing significant improvements in flexibility and redundancy and the ability to scale easily as they developed.

Korrect Software: Korrect is a Mauritius provider of royalty processing, metadata management and sales analysis for record labels and companies in the music and entertainment industry. When the company needed a robust cloud-based delivery platform that would support increasing volumes of data and allow users to generate reports on entitled music royalties, it turned to IBM Cloud.

With the implementation of a bare-metal server infrastructure, provisioned by IBM Cloud, to support its music royalty application, Korrect gained the ability to efficiently process tremendous amounts of data without bandwidth limitations. IBM’s cloud-based solution allows application users to get timely reports on their entitled royalties.

A Ghanaian media company improved operating efficiency, boosted its revenue streams and reduced customer churn and its total cost of ownership when it selected IBM Cloud.

The company implemented a new billing and subscriber management system called FDTV which is based on the scalable IBM WebSphere software and an IBM data server.

Available in five regional areas surrounding Accra, Kumasi, Takoradi, Cape Coast and Elmina, FDTV provides a variety of television and radio stations through a monthly subscription. The broadcaster now anticipates that it will easily accommodate the growth of its subscriber base for years to come.

Serve Consulting: Since migrating its infrastructure to the IBM Cloud, Nigeria-based IT solutions provider, Serve, is able to offer customers higher-quality service levels. In addition, the company has achieved an effective operating expenditure model that is much easier to use and manage.

The company is now looking forward to expanding beyond its existing markets as a result of IBM’s global footprint.

IntTeck Global Systems: a local developer and vendor for Global Insurance Business Solution, a core insurance application from Lagos, Nigeria, needed to consistently deliver innovative software products and enhance the efficiency of its service delivery value chain.

Since adopting IBM’s Cloud infrastructure, the company has experienced increased customer satisfaction levels, easier configuration and deployment of virtual machines, reduced operational costs and improved regulatory compliance within its industry.

In January 2016, IBM was ranked #1 in Hybrid and positioned as a leader in Hybrid Cloud Management Solutions (Synergy Group Research and Forrester, respectively).