APC improves partnership support

The APC by Schneider Electric said it has improved support on offer across the East and West African channel for partners.

Director for the Central and North East Africa region at APC by Schneider Electric, Mr. Jonathan Duncan, said that under the Channel Partner Programme in East and West Africa, is aimed at assisting the channel partners to build a solutions-focused power and cooling practice with increased knowledge and expertise.

Also, Duncan said it would provide them with the tools needed to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

The improvement of the programme, he said, emerges amidst growing levels of power consumption, record cooling demands and greater requirements for energy efficiency.

“Physical infrastructure used to be an afterthought, but now it’s first on the agenda. Nobody understands the landscape and where the market is headed better than APC by Schneider Electric,” he said.

Duncan explained that with the company’s Partner Online Destination (POD), the online embodiment of the Channel Partner Programme, APC is helping its channel partners develop competencies, seize opportunities, be more profitable, and grow their businesses over the long-term.

According to him, POD comprises of six elements namely the profile, alignment, empowerment, enablement, collaboration and profit.

As said by him, the profile involves identifying the distinguishing demographics of a channel partner’s core business and competency, in the belief that “the more we know about you, the better we can support you.”

On the alignment, he said, maximising business profile and core competencies by aligning partners into one of four tiers, first by business environment, then, further, by key discipline. While the empowerment, he said, is continued education to enhance problem-solving skills with on-demand online trainings.

“The training is divided into two paths; sales and engineering,” he said.

Additionally, he said, the enablement affords partners to have online sales and marketing tools that help them to grow their businesses, including co-branded promotional items, newsletter templates, customisable spec sheets, downloadable brochures, and videos.

Just as the collaboration links complementary partners to share their strengths, stressing that partners who collaborate with other solution providers have grown deeper customer relationships and delivered more value to customers.

On profit, Duncan said it provides financial differentiation to partners, including upfront preferred pricing, an opportunity registration programme, back-end incentives, and other programmes that ensure the partner relationship is profitable.

Remmy Nweke

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Oracle Day comes to Nigeria

Plans have been advanced for Oracle to bring its innovative showcase tagged Oracle Day to the commercial nerve centre of the country, Lagos on Thursday, November 17, this year.

A press statement made available to ITRealms Online by the Oracle Country Manager, Nigeria, Ms Layo Ajayi,  informed that following on from the hugely successful Oracle OpenWorld 2011 event in San Francisco, Oracle is running a series of events in major African, European and Middle Eastern cities, with Lagos slated for showcase of the innovations unveiled in California.

The Oracle Day events with the theme, “More Expertise More Innovation, More Insight” according to Ajayi, would be held in 28 cities across Eastern and Central Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Each event, she disclosed would be a powerhouse combination of C-level, functional, and technology tracks, all dedicated to one goal; showing Oracle customers and prospects how the power of simplicity can change Information Technology (IT) to a force that drives business innovation.

These, she said, consist of the latest success stories in business transformation, development in Oracle’s public and private cloud computing solutions, new ways of maximizing IT efficiency and driving business value, best practices and case studies on deploying a fully integrated and engineered stack and everything IT professionals need to know about fully integrated and open business applications.

As said by her, Oracle OpenWorld was an incredibly exciting event to attend and see Oracle launch such a wide range of innovative products, stressing that the event brought to life the power of hardware and software, engineered to work together to bring unmatched benefits to businesses everywhere. 

“Through these Oracle Day events, we want to take this excitement out to as many people as we can,” she said.

Meanwhile, in a related development, Oracle at the Openworld in San Francisco, unveiled an enterprise social network to enable business users to work together using a suite of collaboration tools.

According to Claire Alexander who quoted the chief executive officer, Oracle, Mr. Larry Ellison as saying that an enterprise collaboration and social networking tool for business would enables business users to find and collaborate with the right people within their enterprise and across enterprises.

He cited an instanced with suppliers, partners and customers using information from the human resources system and their own private social network.

Oracle social network, he also said, allows business users to pool resources with each other using a broad range of collaboration tools, including personal profiles, groups, activity feeds, status updates, discussion forums, document sharing, co-browsing and editing, instant messaging, email, and web conferencing.

“Oracle Social Network is seamlessly integrated with Oracle Fusion Applications, business intelligence, and business processes allowing users to receive real-time information feeds from these systems and to collaborate and resolve business issues quickly and effectively, including updating applications and business processes from the Oracle Social Network,” Ellison said.

Adding that Oracle Social Network is designed to allow mobile users to always stay connected and to participate in business conversations by providing native applications on a variety of devices, including iPhones, iPads, and Android devices, as well as a modern, easy-to-use browser interface.

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Nigeria needs national grand SNOC – Ekuwem

Group Managing Director, Teledom Group, Dr. Emmanuel Ekuwem has called for the establishment of a national grand’s Security Network Operating Centres (SNOC) countrywide, beginning with emphasis on locating such at the local government headquarters.

The establishment of these SNOC with integrated downstream master, mini and micro versions, he said would ensure national security surveillance, monitoring, tracking, isolation and arrest of criminals.

Dr. Ekuwem who made this calls recently at the West Africa ICT Congress dwelt on the ‘Use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for National Homeland Security Operations,’ noted that core things to realize when it comes to security is the people, the country in question, lives and property, peace and order.

The aforementioned, he said, would be incomplete without enabling law to prosecute crimes or criminals, therefore, a vibrate law enforcement agencies are needed which must consider privacy, fundamental human rights of the citizenry.

Security, he outlined could be subdivided into physical, economic, cyber, and spiritual to name a few, which has the potentials of encouraging investments both locally and from foreign counterparts, thereby raising the economic activities and productivity of a given nation.

With economic growth and development, he pointed out, jobs and wealth would be created for the population, which conversely increases the Gross Domestic Products (GDP) and draws the dream of realizing the Vision 20-2020 nearer to the populace.

“In one word security underpins any development be it economic, political or social,” he declared.

Additionally, Ekuwem said that by establishing a comprehensive and integrated cargo, container, truck, tanker and vehicle scanning system with local and remote monitoring, data storage and date-and-time specific playback, will boost the economic development of the country.

“Addressing the root causes of insecurity; corruption, poverty, poor quality of education, joblessness and ostentatious lifestyles of public office holders and economic elite,” he said.

Ekuwem reiterated the calls for the establishment of a national Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) to manage and protect the country’s cyberspace.

He pointed out that by integration of the resultant cargo and vehicle scanning system, video-audio surveillance system, CERT and Global Positioning System (GPS)-based will aid the location and movements of law enforcement teams.

According to him, with adequate security infrastructure on ground like the establishment of SNOC, ‘who’s who is uniquely identified.’

Emphasising that its possible to track from cradle to grave the lawful or/and criminal routes of every Nigerian, just as any data on specific individual could still be assembled from scattered or distributed sources.

“Every human activity leaves a trace,” he asserted, adding that by assembling traces aids the establishment of integrity of citizens.

Identity authentication and verification, he said, must be made in a way that identity are non-repudiation, thus unique biometrics which involves finger print, Iris, facial recognition whereas the name may not be unique.

“Each human eye iris is unique,” he said, noting that state, local government area, ward, village of origin or of domicile could be used in the classification alongside the geopolitical zone, namely the south-south, south east, south west, north west, north central and north east as well as birth date, and age to name a few must be encompassed to ensure a complete verification of identities.

Remmy Nweke

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QoS: NGOs supports NCC over sanction

Two Non-governmental Organisations, namely the Africa Telecom Development Initiative (ATDI) and Africa Telecom Consumers Assembly (ATCA) have drummed support for the regulator’s planned sanctioning of mobile operators in the country by end of this November if they refuse to improve the quality of service on their networks.

ITRealms Online recalls that last weekend, telecom regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) had issued a directive to the trio of Globacom, Airtel and MTN to enhance the quality of service on their respective networks based on the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) on or before the end of November, otherwise risk being sanctioned.

The proposed sanction by NCC include putting a stop on adding new subscribers until further notice while defiant may pay N1m per new subscriber.

The two NGO in a joint press statement made available to ITRealms Online and signed by their secretaries, Messrs Ken Ugbechie and Alfred Katung, both drummed support the regulator, the NCC.

The group also condemned what they described as “scant regard for the sensitivities of telecom consumers in the country.”

Equally, the group expressed their dissatisfaction with the quality of service being offered by the service providers in a country where they have individually and collectively made the most profit on the African market.

“The Nigerian market is by far the largest telecom market in Africa and therefore ought to be treated with some degree of respect. Unfortunately, some of these service providers have simply refused to accord the millions of consumers in the country some respect. It is the people that make the networks, we expect operators to realise this and do everything they can to give the over 90 million telecom consumers real value for their money”, ATDI said.

In lending support to NCC, the pan-African organisations urged the Executive Vice Chairman of NCC, Dr Eugene Juwah, not to relent in his quest to bequeath to consumers a legacy of good quality of service.

They noted that while the service providers may be excused for putting up a poor show in qualitative service delivery in the last decade of the telecom revolution because of the overriding necessity to grow the network, such excuse is no longer tenable.

Both organisations acknowledged that it made good economic sense in allowing the networks to take proper footing before exerting pressure on them, but warned that such magnanimity shown by the regulator should not be interpreted as a form of weakness.

Remmy Nweke

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Broadband: mCel finds favour with Ericsson

The Mozambique’s leading mobile network operator, mCel has found favour with Ericsson as it upgraded its broadband offering recently.

mCel founded in November 1997, has grown to be responsible for the explosive growth in mobile network service in Mozambique.

Media Relations Officer for Ericsson West Africa, Ms Omasan Ogisi, disclosed this development to ITRealms Online, saying that the new deal would usher in solution for the Third Generation (3G) coverage extension and capacity upgrade in Mozambique.

In addition, she said, it would enable consistent delivery of rich, high-speed mobile communications to subscribers as well as seeing that core network is upgraded with leading Ericsson Mobile Softswitch Solution.

Ericsson official also said that the company has been chosen as preferred supplier by leading Mozambican operator mCel to upgrade and expand its existing 3G radio network in Maputo, Mozambique’s capital city, using the latest Ericsson technology.

This, she said, includes the RBS 6000, which earlier this year was used in setting the record for the fastest internet in the world.

This contract, Ogisi stated in a press statement made available to ITRealms Online as building on Ericsson’s longstanding relationship with mCel and comes on the handy after the recently completed upgrade of mcel’s 3G core network by Ericsson.

“The network upgrade will enable mCel to provide high-speed mobile broadband which can deliver video and web application services, thereby offering their subscribers a superior user experience,” she said.

Chief executive officer, mCel, Mr. Mamudo Ibraimo was quoted as saying that under the agreement, Ericsson will deploy its industry leading core network solutions as well as its multi-standard base station RBS 6000, to support the GSM/EDGE, 3G (WCDMA/HSPA) and 4G (LTE).

The core network solutions, he affirmed would include Ericsson’s Mobile Softswitch Solution and Ericsson SmartEdge-based Mobile Packet Backbone Network (MPBN) solution which efficiently handle the take off of voice and data.

mCel, he said, now has more than 4.3 million customers and the most extensive network in the country with coverage of 65 per cent of the geographical area, and 75 per cent of the population.

Remmy Nweke

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