Roy Kruger is the Managing Director of BCX Nigeria, a 100% owned subsidiary of Business Connexion (BCX South Africa).

Kruger with more than 23 years experience in fixed and mobile telephony operations and management has gained a huge amount of knowledge relating to all aspects of telecommunications.

He spoke to hilary okeke on a wide range of issue in the industry.

 
About  IPTV

IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television whereby you use technology to take normal television, put it into IP packets and send them across to regional wide area or local area networks, as opposed to broadcasting in the traditional manner. Although IPTV can be broadcast across a satellite network; it is just a much cheaper and ubiquitous manner of sending television to users. To receive IPTV, you need a PC, and local people in the country do not have them. As you know, the most common way of receiving broadcast signals today is through TV sets. Once ICT infrastructure gets to more people, IPTV will become very common. Right now, IPTV is used mostly in office buildings or housing estates where people can run fibre optic rings around the place, and then bring it in via satellite and spread it around by a fibre optic link.

Current Global Recession and Business Sense in Outsourcing

Outsourcing in some instances can save a lot of money because what it basically entails is that you go to a company and present them with a proposal whereby you take over their manpower cost and the cost involved specifically with IT. If a company manufactures motor vehicles, its primary job is to manufacture vehicles and not to worry about the efficiency of the computers, or the pay increase for the personnel. As an outsourcing company, BCX will take away that burden on that company and take over their manpower and ICT management. There are lots of advantages to doing that because companies can save on manpower and more importantly, their IT remains up-to-date because we replace it as opposed to them buying and keeping it for many years. As an outsourcing company, we make sure that it remains up-to-date with no extra cost to the companies; all they need to do is pay a flat fee every month.

Role in IT Infrastructure Building

BCX does systems integrating. We do not use a specific product from a specific company. We use various products from various companies – the best in the world from different manufacturers. For example, we use products from Cisco, Huawei, Avaya, Nortel and a score of companies. We take these products and design them to suit the companies, and then install, commission and maintain the various companies’ networks.

Services for the Banking Sub-sector

Banks traditionally have perhaps a couple of thousand people working for them. So, the primary area we would like to work in is called Internet Protocol Telephony (IPT). Here, we rationalize the whole telephone system within the bank, we install a central call system which takes the place of the traditional Private Automatic Branch exchange (PABX), and we turn the whole network into a digital one. In other words, your phones become more than phones. On a single handset, you can browse the Internet, make voice calls, watch videos and communicate either within or outside of the building. On top of that, we put in place what is called unified communications which for instance, takes a voice message and turns it into a text message or vice versa. So on a single handset, you can make all your communications; hence the name ‘unified communications.’ You receive all communications whether text, e-mail, voice or video – you receive it onto one point of presence. For banks with head offices and hundreds of branches, we build wide area connectivity for those branches either by using satellite, radio or traditional terrestrial communications.

Disaster Recovery not Taken Seriously

That is an area where many people learn the hard way. What that means is they wait until an actual disaster takes place, and then it is a case of regrets. But a number of the bigger organizations have realized the importance of this. Companies can do disaster recovery themselves or outsource it, and that is becoming a very popular way of doing disaster recovery. Many companies, especially the telecom operators, are building data centres to which they then outsource IT infrastructure, and they provide services which include disaster recovery – that is now becoming very popular in Nigeria. The reluctance about disaster recovery may not necessarily be due to cost. The ongoing running of an infrastructure which you might or never need – that is where the cost comes in. It is not the hardware but the ongoing operations that do cost a lot of money.

Application of Business Intelligence in Organization’s Success

Business intelligence can be done in a number of ways. The most popular one is what we call the customer relationship management (CRM) system. CRM systems are traditionally very expensive to maintain. But with the call centre technology and the integration of CRM into call centres today, it is becoming a much easier task to do. It allows you to gain intelligence on your customers’ data – their hobbies, date of birth – so that you can better serve them. From the BCX point of view, we use business intelligence as a way of producing a business case for our customers. We put together the business case to show customers that by using this type of equipment and technology, they would gain a better access to their customers and thereby increase their market share.

IP without Fibre

If you look at the history of IP, it dates back to 1969 in the American Department of Defense. Within this department was a group called Advanced Research Project Agency (Arpa), and the Department asked Arpa to come up with a method of connecting every single computer to one another within the American defence force. So Arpa went out and found that some areas had IBM, some HP, some Dell – they were faced with the challenge of synchronizing the computers which could not communicate with one another. So the only way for them to do it was to come up with a common set of rules, which they used to connect all the computers to one another. And they thought: “We just might as well call this thing an Internet.” Thus the name, Internet Protocol (IP). That is, Internet set of rules. IP is just a set of rules. The question now is – how do we deliver Internet more efficiently? Internet can run on any type of infrastructure; it has no limits on the type of infrastructure on ground. It is only a set of principles that is implemented and then you can run voice, video and data on top of IP. It can run over fibre; it can run over copper; it can run over radio; it can run over satellite. There are no limitations. They all deliver the same in terms of quality; it is just that when you consider fibre optics, it can provide more bandwidth but if you are running over it or copper at the same speed, there is no difference in the delivery. They both deliver the same quality and at the same speed.

About BCX

BCX is arguably the largest ICT Company in Africa. We have more than 5, 000 people working for the company; we are Cisco Gold partners, Avaya Platinum partners; we have many accreditations with the largest companies in the world. Technology makes BCX tick but I think more than that, we look at the types of people we hire specifically in Nigeria. I have made it a routine to hire students that are just out of the university and they are all clever young guys. Within six months, they gain huge experience and exposure within BCX. Developing the young people within Nigeria is one of our goals.