It's April 7, 1964, and while the Beatles are telling the
world that 'Money Can't Buy Me Love', IBM is attempting to convince the
business community that it can at least buy you a decent mainframe.
The IBM System/360 – touted as the Big Blue's most innovative
iteration to date – had just been announced, and since then the technology
industry has changed in extraordinary ways, shaping the way we live, work, and
play. The impact on Africa has been profound, with the continent and its people
now connected with each other and the rest of the world in ways that couldn't
possibly have been imagined only a decade or so ago. But how did the
connectivity we now all take for granted first come about?
For 17 years after the System/360 launch, the world of
technology was living its 1st Platform. In this world, mainframes reigned
supreme, and just a few million enterprise users on the planet had access to
them via terminals. Throughout this era and way into the subsequent one, all
computer-related activity was restricted to the interaction between a person
and a computer. However, such interaction was never of a personal nature.
This would only change after the end of the 1st Platform,
although the event that made this transformation possible actually happened
during that era; in 1973, to be precise – the year Bob Metcalfe broke new tech
ground by inventing Ethernet at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center.
Fast forward to 1981 and the tech world was taking its first
tentative steps onto the 2nd Platform. This was the age of the server-client
model and the PC – the device that, together with the Ethernet and the local
and wide area networks it made possible, brought about the personalization of
IT. And when PCs started becoming more interconnected around 1983, we quickly moved
into a world where one of the most incredible creations ever imagined – email –
started being used to share company information online from different places on
Earth.
From this point, we move 10 years into the future. CERN (the
European Organization for Nuclear Research) is set to redefine the whole world
as we know it by creating a global hypertext system and making it available to
the public as the World Wide Web. This exacted one of the most amazing leaps in
technology: we went beyond sharing company documents with specific people to
sharing personal data with complete strangers. Blogging was born, and was soon
to be followed by a personal data generation and sharing revolution.
The 25 years of the 2nd Platform era were characterized by
an exponential increase in the number of users and applications – users went
from millions to hundreds of millions and applications went from thousands to
tens of thousands. Still, the computing industry was focused on the enterprise,
and personal usage of computers was secondary. Its progress would come as a
result of advances in enterprise systems and applications.
And so we arrive at 2007, the year when the iPhone and
Google Apps were launched and Amazon and Salesforce.com began offering their
cloud services. At this time both Hadoop and Twitter were only around a year
old, while Facebook had just become available to the general public for the
first time several months earlier. These were the seeds of what we now
recognize as the main trends in technology adoption today: mobility, cloud
computing, Big Data analytics, and social media. Or in other words, the 3rd
Platform.
The year 2007 also signaled an exciting new era of
connectivity across Africa. In October that year, Rwanda hosted the 'Connect
Africa' summit, with the aim of expanding the continent's broadband backbone
infrastructure and access networks. Pledges totaling $55 billion were announced
during the conference, with national and regional interconnectivity initiatives
taking center stage in a bid to ensure that Africa capitalized on the broadband
and ICT opportunities already being taken for granted elsewhere in the world.
The upshot has been the proliferation of Internet exchange
points and rural connectivity projects during the intervening years, while numerous
major undersea cables have also entered operation. Spearheaded by the Kenyan
government, the TEAMS cable began service in 2009, connecting the country to
the rest of the world via the UAE, and in the following year the EASSy cable
system brought widespread connectivity to the wider East Africa region, with
landing points in nine countries along the coast and connections to at least
ten landlocked nations. Three years later, West Africa got in the act with the
WACS cable connecting South Africa to the UK via 12 landing points along the
western coast.
Such developments have increased the availability of
bandwidth enormously and brought about a significant decline in the cost of
connectivity, factors that will prove crucial as African governments, businesses,
and citizens increasingly look to embrace the endless possibilities presented
by the 3rd Platform. Difficulties remain, of course, with the need to improve
last-mile connectivity hampered by the limited penetration of fixed telephony
across large parts of the continent, but Broadband Wireless Access solutions
that can tap into Africa's vast mobile network offer a more connected future
for even the most rural of communities.
With IDC expecting spending on public cloud
services in emerging African countries to grow at a compound annual growth rate
(CAGR) of up to 84% over the coming five years, it is clear that the 3rd
Platform has well and truly arrived in Africa. The journey to this stage has
seen the tech world move from computers the size of family cars to invisible
cloud storage, and with applications increasingly escaping the corporate world
to become a means of entertainment, self expression, and communication, the
next 50 years are sure to be even more eventful!
*Contributed by Mark Walker, Regional Director: Sub-Saharan Africa, IDC (pix insert)
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