Access, Speed and Agility: "Cloud is Ready for Take-Off in Africa" decides Cloud Africa 2012

Day 1 of Cloud Africa 2012 took place in the Midrand Convention Centre, Johannesburg, yesterday.  500 Operators,  Enterprise CIOs & Telecoms Professionals have gathered to attend with over 49% of those registered are CxO/Director level; 198 of them representing large African enterprises and 205 coming from the telecoms players. Bright and early the conference hall was packed ready for the opening discussions - including the opening keynote from sponsor Safaricom's representative Sylvia Mulinge, General Manager of the Enterprise Business Unit, which made a strong message about Kenya's readiness for cloud. In Safaricom's view the next hurdle is educating consumers so that they can consume cloud as voraciously as they do internet.

The day 1 message was clear - cloud is a dream business model for African customers, there is just a need in the industry need to share best practice for cloud, and then the next stage will be customer awareness campaigns.





Alongside this key message the plethora of expert speakers and the 2 focus tracks, ensured that the day 1 conference covered a great deal of ground. This included demands on infrastructure for telcos wishing to become cloud service providers (MTN Business), Cloud apps for working in the future today (Grove & Google), driving collaboration (Microsoft), managing cloud services (Safaricom), government strategies for funding cloud (Africa CIO Forum), how to meet expectations on quality of service (Metro Ethernet Forum), and more....





Organiser's Com World Series' Conference Manager, Emily Martyr, said "we're delighted with the first day of the event, the quality of delegates has been commented on by many of the sponsors, our speakers have given extremely informative presentations, and for a launch event in Africa we are thrilled to receive such support from operators, enterprise CIOs and vendors - today has gone extremely well."


Networking and experience sharing were an integral part of day 1, with the Speed Networking a huge success for participants.  And especially the Cloud Africa Awards Ceremony - sponsored by Safaricom Business. Alongside the drinks and nibbles there were four exclusive categories, with a great deal of applause for the winners: Huawei, IMIMobile, Grove Group/Google and EMC.

Day 2 takes place on Thursday 24th May, with the promise of more great speakers, and informative panel discussions, including; Felix Martin-Aguilar, Strategy Executive & Head of Business Services at Cell C, Douglas Reed, CEO at Vox Telecom, Thomas Luketich, VP of Strategic Marketing at EMC to name just a few.

Thank you to all the Sponsors of Cloud Africa:
   
- Safaricom
- Huawei
- Business Connexion
- Grove Group
- Google
- EMC
- Parallels
- Microsoft
- IBM

For full details see the website: www.cloudafricasummit.com to hear what's gone on in more detail check out #CloudAfricaCWS on Twitter