advertisement
AfricaOnline Namibia sees managed service surge
AfricaOnline Namibia one of Africa’s leading ISPs, and a Gondwana International Networks (GIN) company, says that its managed infrastructure and…
AfricaOnline Namibia one of Africa’s leading ISPs, and a Gondwana International Networks (GIN) company, says that its managed infrastructure and services solution, has seen significant uptake within the SME sector, with a 60% increase in sales over the past year.
Ryno Kuhn, corporate sales executive, AfricaOnline Namibia, says that IT-spend is on the rise: “Analysts predicted an increase in spend and that managed services will see a greater percentage of this growth. We can definitely see this trend and expect it to continue.”
Kuhn says managed services are almost seen as the ‘comeback kid’ of technology: “After the 90’s trend of application service providers, managed services are resurfacing as an important priority for many companies. This is also driven by the increasing importance and maturity of cloud technology, the blurred lines between cloud and managed services, as well as customer demands for a different service and billing mechanism.”
advertisement
Marc Gregan, Managing Director, AfricaOnline Namibia, says that to remain relevant in the marketplace, companies must move outside traditional implementation and support services: “There is great demand for managed services support in Africa. Also, cloud simply cannot deliver on its own making a managed service such as AfricaOnline’s a viable and cost effective option.”
Kuhn says the demand is industry wide, with new customers emerging from hospitals, law and accounting consultancies, construction companies as well as a big surge from the mining sector.
“The fixed cost as a rental is very attractive to customers. They also like the fact that we simply replace their IT and manage all aspects. This includes: back-ups and archiving; firewalls and all security, server exchange management, email messaging systems and full disaster recovery,” says Kuhn.
advertisement
The backup and archiving, according to Kuhn is key, based on Namibian law this will soon become a non-negotiable requirement for all local businesses.
AfricaOnline has established itself as one of the leading ISP’s in Namibia. It was previously known as MWeb Namibia, before the acquisition and inclusion into Gondwana International Networks as AfricaOnline Namibia.
The company offers the following products and services to the home and corporate market: WiMax, leased lines, MPLS, ADSL, VSAT, 4G LTE hosting, mail services, domains and disaster recovery.