Managed services support key to growth of Kenya’s SMEs

iWayAfrica has partnered with managed services company SevenC Computing to grow its footprint in key Africa territories as the companies seek to engage with more SMEs to offer an innovative product christened iManage.

iManage is a product that will provide customers with a platform that takes away the constant fear of losses, IT management system catastrophes as well provide a solid data backup for large medium and small businesses.

“iManage is a set of Business applications that enable a business to turn on their business agenda, it helps deliver key managed IT services in the form of business grade email, storage, security and business intelligence, redundancy and ongoing 24/7 SLA support,” said Kenneth Munyi iWayAfrica Managing Director.

iWayAfrica which operates in Kenya as a subsidiary of the Pan African Telecoms operator giant Gondwana International (GIN) will spearhead the business growth in the East Africa region with a focus to service existing business portfolio while expanding to new business.

“We have seen great success in Namibia and anticipate excellent growth in key countries such as Zimbabwe, Uganda, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania. There is great demand for level three managed services support as cloud simply cannot deliver on its own,” said Winston Smith, General Manager, terrestrial for GIN and iWayAfrica.

In Kenya customers are at risk of obsolete IT systems, the entire East Africa region is awakening to new investors seeking to engage with individuals and corporate businesses capable of matching international IT integration systems. The current global ITtrends have changed to embrace new and innovative IT systems.

Mr. Munyi observed that the SME sector in Kenya is growing and with its development information storage and backup mechanisms impact on net performance and overall output. “We are in this space to ensure that our SMEs as well as big corporates have the capacity to work with ease,” he said.

Across the continent, customers are at risk from having obsoleted IT systems. In addition, they generally have poorly managed IT services and
very little in place with regards to backup and disaster recovery processes.

Darren Osbourn, Managing Director, SevenC Computing says that customers are also overpaying for IT services and generally need better control of their IT systems and associated user activities: “The African SME mark remains challenged by the same issues as always, limited budget, lack of in-house IT skills and resources as well as poor quality of service. Together with iWayAfrica, we will be providing a much needed quality of service focused on the evolution, deployment and ongoing support of managed IT services.”

Smith said that GIN is very excited about the potential of iWayAfrica’s partnership with SevenC Computing: “We have packaged an excellent combination of software and infrastructure as a service, giving customers the best of the cloud with essential managed services on the ground.”