ICT

Covid-19 has increased demand for faster data speeds.

Invicta Holdings, an investment holdings and management company, has expanded into the fibre field at a time when working from home has massively increased the demand for data. In 2021 Invicta acquired Dartcom Group for R500-million, giving it a presence in the distribution of communication and renewable technologies and the manufacture of fibre optic cables (under licence from Japan).

As South Africa joins the global trend towards online shopping and with the first networks rolling out 5G in 2020, data centres are going up all over the country. The latest to join the trend is software company Oracle which announced in 2021 that

Johannesburg would be the headquarters of its African cloud region. All of the company’s cloud regions worldwide will be 100% powered by renewable energy by 2025.

Teraco stores data in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town.

A second 30MW site is under construction in Brackenfell to complement the existing facility in Rondebosch. Microsoft Azure has facilities in Cape Town and Johannesburg and Amazon has two sites in Cape Town. Huawei Cloud services will use a partner company in Johannesburg to store its data. Africa Data Centre (ADC), part of the Liquid Telecom Group, has purchased a Tier IV data centre in Johannesburg, previously used by Standard Bank.

A 2019 study by Microsoft found that the cloud ecosystem will create around 112 000 new jobs in South Africa by 2022 (IT Web). The number of permanent employees of Amazon Web

Services reached 7 000 in October 2020.

A new entrant to the South African market relies entirely on the cloud. Uniconta, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for small and medium-sized businesses, opened its first offices in Cape Town in 2019, a precursor to plans to expand elsewhere in Africa.

Cell C became South Africa’s third mobile operator in 2001, following MTN and Vodacom. Cell C was in the news early in 2020 when it defaulted on interest payments on a loan and this had an effect on the shares of Blue Label Telecoms, which owns 45% of the operator. When Cell C’s results were announced in October 2020, reference was made to a turnaround strategy.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria will host a new body aimed at preparing South Africa for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), the South African Affiliate Centre of the World Economic Forum.

The Information Technology Association (ITA) is the trade and employer body of the Information Technology industry in South Africa. The ITA represents more than 200 companies which supply information technology equipment, systems, software and services. Members include IBM, Microsoft SA, Siemens, SAP and Axiz. ■

ONLINE RESOURCES

Business Process Enabling SA: www.bpesa.org.za Independent Communications Authority: www.icasa.org.za Technology Innovation Agency: www.tia.org.za SECTOR INSIGHT Johannesburg will host Oracle’s first African data centre.