Africa has the biggest potential as regards IoT- Cisco

Nigeria and the rest of Africa remain a huge breeding ground for the internet of things (IoT), offering the biggest potential, Andy McDonald, VP, global service provider sales, Middle East, Africa and Russia, CISCO, disclosed this while speaking at the just concluded 19th annual edition of AfricaCom, held in Cape Town, South Africa.

Internet of things (IoT) goes beyond connecting computers to actually connecting things; from household utensils, stationeries, and pretty much everything else that can be touched and felt, to the information grid, the idea being to ensure continuous and seamless interactions between humans and object.

“The African market is unique in terms of the speed it is developing at. You have the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world. Actually in Internet of Things, 52 percent of devices that we would term IoT are actually in Africa today,” McDonald said.

He went on to say that skipping levels of evolution due to its fast paced growth in technology is sure to create a gap in terms of skills to manage technology thereby causing some security issues on the continent.

To bridge the gap, Paolo Campoli, senior director, global SP sales CTO, CISCO suggests that a flurry of support be directed at developers who will in turn innovate with IoE.

“You will see in the next few years, a new generation of developers in Africa that programme directly on the platform of the Internet of Things,” Campoli added.

Analytics and big data are becoming prevalent and that word digitalization drive is not only what companies need but countries and people need. Digitization will simplify a lot of companies to reinvent themselves a massive cost cut and simply the way companies do things to become more quicker.

“What has changed in the African market? It’s all about affordability – There is now a flow of investment, fiber being deployed and connectivity is becoming more affordable”, McDonald said.

Nigeria was ranked second in the recent Affordability Index’s ranking of 30 developing economies and 11th out of 51 economies globally — scoring higher than other African developing economies like Kenya, Morocco and Uganda, and higher even than some emerging economies, including Mexico, South Africa, Thailand and Tunisia.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is opening up a world of real opportunities and rapidly transforming communities, cities and the daily lives of people worldwide. Today, the IoT encompasses more than 14 billion devices connected to the Internet. Cisco had earlier in the year predicted in its report that the IoE value at stake will be $14.4 trillion for companies and industries worldwide in the next decade. More specifically, over the next 10 years, the value at stake represents an opportunity to increase global corporate profits by about 21 percent.

With the ubiquity of cloud and big data, with the Internet of Things (IoT) becoming a hot commodity interwoven through it all. The global IOT Energy Market is expected to grow from USD 7.59 Billion in 2015 to USD 22.34 Billion by 2020, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 24.1 percent during the forecast period.

Josephine Okojie