#Africacom2015: Cisco to help scale up SMEs through tailor made solutions

Small and Medium Entreprises are viewed as major contributors to any country’s GDP, there fore need for them to keep up with the changing technologies so that they can stay ahead of others.

It is in regards to this that Cisco is helping SMEs scale-up across Africa by providing them with affordable connectivity through Cisco Mereki.

“We believe in SMEs being key enablers to any economy and therefore our need to provide tailor made solutions for SMEs at low cost through Cisco Mereki. Most SMEs, lack IT managers or even IT Departments therefore we have fully managed solutions for SMEs at low cost including affordable routers as well as cloud solutions,” said Paolo Campoli, Senior Director Global SP Sales CTO at AfricaCom 2015.
Cisco acquired Mereki in 2012 at USD 1.2 billion.Cisco Meraki is a cloud-managed networking platform that offers edge and branch networking solutions, including wireless, switching, security and mobile device management products.

The solutions include centralized management, Layer 7 device and application visibility, real-time web-based diagnostics, monitoring and reporting.

With Cisco’s key focus being on connectivity and IoT, Cisco predicts over 50 billion devices connected by 2020, this means more data generation that will require storage, so on what Cisco was doing on IoT and storage Mr. Campoli said that being in the analytic space, they were running Analytics as a Service for major IoT providers, which is a service that allows organisations localize data and not transfer across boarder for data sovereignity.

In terms of security, in their cloud provision he said that Cisco was bringing security to all IP end points through its security architecture.