ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK: Africa makes technology work like nowhere else on earth
There are too many challenges on this continent that technology can address in new ways
One single statistic revealed this week summed up a dramatic shift in technology use across Africa. At the Saphila 2017 conference at Sun City, where customers of the global enterprise software company SAP gathered, the company announced that its cloud software business had grown by a massive 147% across Africa in the past year. At the same time, its on-premise business, where it has traditionally been a world leader in enterprise resource planning software, grew "only" at a respectable 21%. Brett Parker, MD of SAP Africa, also revealed that the latter now made up less than a fifth of the company's revenue in Africa. This, he said, meant that migration to the cloud was happening more rapidly across the continent than anyone had anticipated; it also showed that businesses were leapfrogging traditional enterprise resource planning software in much the same way that cellphones had allowed consumers to leapfrog landline phones on a massive scale. This was opening up many opportunities f...
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