Dick Venema, chief executive officer, Venema Advies Nigeria Limited, has said a professionally maintained information technology (IT) infrastructure could save organisation operating costs (OPEX) of between 20-30 percent.
According to him, the current practice where companies adopt ‘the break-fix model’ is costing companies huge sums of money, adding that the lack of professional advice is a major drawback.
“This is not how it works; in most cases, equipment is not broken; it is just badly maintained. This is usually due to the absence technical knowledge of IT by consultants and bad advice from some of the IT firms,” said Venema while speaking with journalists in Lagos.
According to him, companies can optimise IT by maintaining it efficiently. “That will reduce the expenditure companies make by buying new equipment every time that something goes wrong. I think for most companies, they can save around 20 percent to 30 percent at least a year by just maintaining the environment right as in good service,” he added.
Venema said this should not be limited to equipment but everything must be kept running smoothly. “It all begins with the right advice and if the consultant who advises the company has no knowledge of what is happening in the IT world, he would not be able to advise the chief information officer (CIO) or CEO on the right solutions.”
He cited internet connections as an example where a lot of companies are still running on slow satellite connection while optic fibre cable (OFC) is available, running through the street. He said though OFC connection may be expensive over satellite or aerial connection, it has the advantage of stability.
“What we see in Nigeria is that most firms are spending a lot of money on IT and still it is not working. So what we would like to offer them is a free cloud assessment of the current environment and to see how we can upgrade to a private or public cloud without any or minimal capital cost.
“No public data center or rack space is needed. Your own private cloud in your firm without high costs upfront.
“We deliver complete private clouds with subscription models for VMWare, Microsoft, Symantec, RES and Trend Micro.” He said his firm is partnering with a satellite firm, Immarsat, to bring capacities into the country at affordable prices to boost the economy, adding that connectivity is central to economic prosperity.
He said: “The Global Express technology that Inmarsat presented at AfriCom in South Africa, promises to deliver a higher capacity for prices basically comparable to the fibre connections here in Nigeria. So for companies which don’t have access to a fibre connection, they still can get this 50 megabytes (Mb) speed by satellite.
“We all know that we still have a long way to go in Nigeria for a complete fibre coverage and that a lot of companies are still on satellite, but reaching a 10-20Mb speed for really a comparable price, brings cloud computing closer for companies who do not have high capacity access now.
Inmarsat even has a strategic alliance with Cisco to develop a platform for more advanced applications such as TV on demand, tele-presence and collaborative working.” He said the company is working towards delivering complete Information Technology (IT) solutions together with its partners, adding that with current services and products, we deliver turnkey projects that are related to connectivity, to computing environments and to communication.
By: Ben Uzor Jr
