If you want to expand your business overseas,
your choices are limited. Europe and other developed markets are debatably saturated
though economic growth is not strong; so the biggest opportunity lies in the
undeveloped, but burgeoning markets of Africa. Africa is seen as a land of
opportunity, with masses of people desperately in need of limitless numbers of
products and services, and land rich with untapped natural resources…
But doing business in Africa brings its own
challenges, including a massive lack of infrastructure at most levels. Flights
are few and unreliable. The distances you need to travel are often impossible
to cover without going from plane to train to bus to taxi over days; which is
not only inconvenient but also prohibitively expensive in both time and actual
cost.
There are large portions of the African
continent that have security issues – from war zones, to theft born out of
poverty and desperation, to a lack of physical infrastructure to protect people
from natural disasters such as flooding and fire. These physical discomforts
and threats are obstacles to convincing skilled professionals needed to run
businesses and implementations to travel to these places.
Once you have managed to safely reach your
destination, you then face the difficulties of actually doing business there;
from slow to non-existent connectivity to juggling the legal and cultural diversities
prevalent throughout the continent and even within individual countries on the
continent.
Cloud-based services offer an obvious way to
expand your business offerings to new clients near and far. There are the
benefits cloud brings to all businesses – cost savings of no longer owing the
infrastructure and software, updates, faster integrations, customisations,
fixes and even additional products and features that can be implemented without
physical presence.
Sounds like manna from heaven in the African
context, addressing many of the pitfalls addressed previously; removing the
constraints of extensive travel, increasing security and redundancy in areas
where both physical safety and natural disasters are commonplace, and providing
world class products to those that otherwise might never have access to them.
Yet, the lack of infrastructure that makes cloud
such a perfect solution for Africa is also the biggest obstruction to it. There
have been enormous developments in the ICT industry in East and West Africa;
but there is still a massive lack of infrastructure to support the high speed
connectivity needed to make cloud a fully viable option. So although the
infrastructure is growing, Africa still needs on-site products.
With many companies focusing their development
on moving away from on-site installation and into the development of cloud, soon
the only thing they will have to offer is cloud… Is that not delivering first
world solutions to a third world continent?
*As published in Accountancy South Africa in February 2015
