Excerpts from DataFlex Technology Cosmic.

A flagship event in partnership with Westcon Comstor to showcase interesting solutions from our OEM partners Cisco and Netapp. 

Our Executive Director (Martins Ndigwe) gave a magnificent presentation on Driving Innovation and Growth Leveraging the 3rd Platform. 

Upshot from his presentation confirmed that Africa spends over 70 billion USD on Information Technology in 2022 which was 10.4% increment in expenditure compare to the previous. 

This shows there are several trends in technology to leverage on in solving critical business challenges which hasn’t been explored. 

He highlighted some major critical challenges that are limiting our growth such as; 

• Technical Know-how
• Governance, Regulation and Compliance
• Limited budgets and funding for IT projects
• ntegration of multiple systems from multiple vendors 
• Lack of relevant IT solutions in the Market

Several of these challenges and more are limiting about 46% of African CIOs struggle to service the needs of their users. Based on this, we now face the race to digitize (Driving end to end process transformation from mobile marketing to fulfilment). In 2023, some of the areas that must be looked into are;

• Mobility
• Big Data Analytics
• Advance Security
• Unified Communications
• Datacentres
• Disaster Recovery, etc.

Statistics showed that 36% of African CIOs allocate budget to innovation projects. However, they failed to fulfil due to challenges in project management, business intelligence and analytics, enterprise architecture. 

These culminates into why we had this strategic event to show technology enthusiasts that we have the staff skills, implementation capabilities, knowledge, OEM relationship, portfolio depth, international experience to drive all IT related projects to conclusion.

Head of Technology Solutions Group (Mkpenyene Udoh) discussed the DataFlex as a one-stop shop for all IT needs. This erase the popular notion of DataFlex been perceived as a Power and Cooling but instead a go to market place for holistic IT business requirements such as;

• Infrastructure and Connectivity
• Cloud and Applications
• Mobility
• Power and Renewable energy
• Security

Peter Nnaji [Channel Manager, Cisco Collaboration and Data Centre at Comstor] took the center stage to discuss about Cisco devices for Microsoft Teams and Full stack observability. He confirmed the new partnership between Cisco and Microsoft that will provide customers with more choice. This partnership will bring native Microsoft Teams interoperability to Cisco Room and Desk devices, marking the first time that Cisco devices will be certified for Microsoft Teams.

Enterprises that purchase these devices will have the option to default the experience to Microsoft Teams Room or the WebEx meeting experience. Additionally, all the devices will be manageable in the Teams Admin Center, the Teams Rooms Pro Management Portal, and the Cisco Control hub device management.

Full stack observability – He proceed to speak about Cisco Full-stack observability as a solution that moves beyond domain monitoring into full-stack visibility, insights, and actions, transforming siloed data into actionable insights that provide shared context across your IT teams. 

Competing in today’s digital business landscape means one thing: what can be delivered digitally, must be delivered digitally, and it must be always on. Your applications, however, are just the front door to an expansive digital landscape that is evolving and growing in scale and complexity. Having more interdependencies, more data, more clouds, and more providers adds up to having more blind spots. Managing it all from isolated islands of monitoring for applications, infrastructure, security, and networks is both inefficient and ineffective and is quickly becoming outside human scale and capability.

Cisco full-stack observability solutions enable you to have an observable and optimizable technology stack to streamline the operations of the teams supporting your technology. With unified contextual insights driven from a single solution providing full-stack observability across your entire application landscape, you can deliver exceptional digital experiences to your users, and correlate them to the impact on your business.

Benefits

• For your digital business, deliver exceptional experiences, optimize for cost and performance, and maximize digital business revenue

• For your IT teams, gain real-time visibility into the full stack of available data across the digital experience

• Contextualize data, system interactions and interdependencies, and business metrics to gain actionable insights into applications and digital experiences and prioritize next steps across your teams.

Anthony Okoh [NetApp Pre-Sales Engineer at Comstor] discussed about secure and intelligent Datacenters solutions for all businesses and how NetApp solutions give you complete control over your data with simplicity, efficiency, flexibility, and a throne to match.

Every data symphony needs a great conductor. NetApp data management solutions empower you to manage your data—on premises and across private and public clouds—with unprecedented flexibility. The data management portfolio helps drive simplicity and efficiency by using software and services that are designed to work together, leverage insights to make better-informed decisions, and boost performance, resilience, and protection.