AfricaOnline sees surge in managed service

AfricaOnline Namibia and a Gondwana International Networks (GIN) company, said that its managed infrastructure and services solution, has seen significant uptake within the SME sector, with a 60% increase in sales over the past year.

Ryno Kuhn, corporate sales executive, AfricaOnline Namibia, said that IT-spend is on the rise: “Analysts predicted an increase in spend and that managed services will see a greater percentage of this growth. We can definitely see this trend and expect it to continue.” Kuhn said managed services is almost seen as the ‘comeback kid’ of technology, “After the 90’s trend of application service providers, managed services is resurfacing as an important priority for many companies. This is also driven by the increasing importance and maturity of cloud technology, the blurred lines between cloud and managed services, as well as customer demand for a different service and billing mechanism.” Marc Gregan, Managing Director, AfricaOnline Namibia, said that to remain relevant in the marketplace, companies must move outside traditional implementation and support services. “There is great demand for managed services support in Africa. Also, cloud simply cannot deliver on its own, making a managed service such as AfricaOnline’s a viable and cost effective option” he said. Kuhn said the demand is industry wide, with new customers emerging from hospitals, law and accounting consultancies, construction companies as well as a big surge from the mining sector.
“The fixed cost as a rental is very attractive to customers. They also like the fact that we simply replace their IT and manage all aspects. This includes: back-ups and archiving; firewalls and all security, server exchange management, email messaging systems and full disaster recovery,” added Kuhn. The backup and archiving, according to Kuhn is key. Based on Namibian law this will soon become a non-negotiable requirement for all local businesses. AfricaOnline has established itself as one of the leading ISP’s in Namibia. It was previously known as MWeb Namibia, before the acquisition and inclusion into Gondwana International Networks as AfricaOnline Namibia. The company offers the following products and services to the home and corporate market: WiMax, leased lines, MPLS, ADSL, VSAT, 4G LTE hosting, mail services, domains and disaster recovery.