Spent a very interesting week at Management World Africa this week in Johannesburg. Travelling so far from home, I was looking forward to learning about the challenges of a communications market that must be very different from my day to day experience in Europe and the USA. But, its a small, small world - and getting smaller!
I was surprised to find that the challenges and opportunities facing the African market are pretty similar to what i am hearing across the globe - saturating markets; a major need for efficiency improvements; a strong interest in improving customer experience; and a strong interest in some of the newer topics such as Cloud and WiMax/LTE. Some of the sophisticated presentations I saw on how to effectively manage customer experience could well act as best practice case studies for the global industry.
There is also a strong awareness of the challenges of over-the-top services and a desire to find ways to monetize increasing bandwidth use. This wasn't as big a challenge in the past as the international bandwidth from Africa to the rest of the world was quite limited. But with the recent significant increase in available international bandwidth, the monetization of it has become a hot issue.
So apart from the great weather, I could have been sitting in a conference in New York or London!
Posted
02-26-2010 5:52 AM
by
Martin Creaner