John Spreadborough, general manager, Westcon Mobility in Pan Emerging Africa, heads up the Motorola based EMB products and associated solution vendors, plus the company’s Print and Scan business.
Spreadborough formerly worked as managing director of TallyGenicom’s Middle East, Africa and India businesses and has over 20 years in the printing and scanning industry.
 Before joining TallyGenicom, he also ran his own Industrial Systems company called Dicoll Industrial, which specialised in measurement systems for tough environments.
Spreadborough, spoke to Miebi Senge on Westcon’s investment in the Nigerian IT market and its strategic partnership with Motorola to increase intake of enterprise solutions in the Sub-Saharan market which he heads from Lagos.

Westcon
WestCom Global is structured as a US leading organization and present in the UK and Johannesburg stock exchanges.
We have a lot of offices across Europe and North America, and about 140 subsidiary companies across the world, of which one is based in Nigeria.
So we have a management team and stock people here.  We do not manage businesses necessary from London or from the United States; a lot of our decisions here are reached in consonance with the local markets demands.
To us, Nigeria is a very favourable and vigorous market recognized across the globe; therefore we are very comfortable with the management team working here.

Westcon’s Business in Nigeria
Our Nigerian business covers the entire West Africa subregion. We have several organisations in Senegal, Cameroun, and all of (Anglo) West and Central Africa.
Although, I may not give you a breakdown of the volume in individual country, at the same time, the volume of our business this year in Africa will be about $150 million.
We are optimistic about continued fulfilling businesses in Africa.

 Accessing Nigeria’s Enterprise Market
Sure, the market is so fast moving. There are comments in some quarters about the Nigeria economy overtaking South Africa’s between 2015/16.
And the country is catching on and moving on steadily. But when you look at how that translates in the enterprise market space… I do not think it is that forward, stable and matured as the South African.
Truly, there is a tremendous revolution in technology adoption and inclusion in Nigeria in the recent times than as in South Africa; thus in Nigeria, a lot of people and corporations are moving forward adopting measures that would support them both now and in the future.
For instance they are embracing the cloud abandoning papers and that is a characteristic that impacts on the market.
Even if we do not have answers as regards the market size, what gladdens one’s heart is the level of enthusiasms to adopt technology and the sophistications of the adopted technologies by various companies.
The process is revealing the country’s or the market’s expertise in using technology to change the tune of events. Therefore, as the Nigerian market is getting more sophisticated it will embrace features that will push it to move fast in the nearest future. 

View of Technological Migration to Data
The adoption of unified communications in various applications, for instance, is a sure way of improving on the space, especially for the enterprise.
A number of companies, like Microsoft are making it possible. Some of the things we heard from Nigerians, especially the Nigerian telecom sector are growing a unified technology ecosystem for the sector to mitigate the challenges that each unit faces.
Those things are evolving in Nigeria, for instance the adoption of wireless broadband is one of the aspects of the market is being driven forward; it is not actually easy to deploy multiple technologies to mitigate the lack of infrastructure in a country.
The World Bank published a report last year which was showing; in terms of supply there is a huge amount of data being spread all over Africa including Nigeria; which shows there is viability as data is very attractive to the people. However, the next big step is to look at the infrastructure.

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 Any plan with your partner – Motorola – to migrate broadband infrastructure from the shoreline to hinter land?
Well, there is migration. We have a technology that some companies are using in migrating the infrastructure to the hinterlands.
The local organizations are actually the ones that thinker on the resources to drive the next step.
 
Programmes to Enhance Carriers in the Enterprise Sector
Some of the carriers are moving into the enterprise themselves in terms of deploying data solutions for the consumer.
If we review what is happening in the Middle East, a lot of local and multi-nationals bringing data services up to consumer level.
Such is likely to happen here whereby the local companies deliver the data and also generate the internet for the consumer’s usage.
Through that means, the enterprise market will deepen. Meanwhile, from the enterprise perspective when the volume of data rises then, there will be specific technology we will be looking at. Similarly, a lot of companies are increasing their investment portfolio and resources in Africa.
For instance, Coca Cola has increased its investment to $1 billion. Those guys in enterprise space are putting their money where the cash is going to come from in future, which is Africa.

Playing in the Cashless Nigeria Regime
There are a couple of things that are happening in the sector that are quite interesting. The moment manufacturers come out with physical printers, so that is the text collecting machines, and other automation devices, that is part of the cashless economy.
The direction of the present policy is going to fall in line with the style adopted in East Africa. So, we have some technologies that are geared towards cashless economy.
We have been working with some banks and pay systems; we have local banking systems that will even help bring to the banks the unbanked in small villages.
When that is exploited, it will open up the cashless economy even further. So these are the steps coming up next and I expect it happens soon. In other words, mobile banking is the next step.

Mobility in the Nigeria Economy in the Next 5 Years
I see the mobility on a fast lane. Everything is moving from plan to execution. With the double digit in technology growth in West Africa happening more recently, in the last five years, Nigeria has been the leader in over a decade, and I see that trend continuing even further than most analysts expect.