From ITWeb Africa

A new survey conducted by IDG Connect on behalf of SAP Africa has highlighted the fantastic opportunity open to cloud service providers (CSPs) as a result of  Africa’s rapid adoption of mobile network technology. 

This survey, entitled Africa Set for Cloud Market Expansion, sets out the possibility for new revenue streams and business that will be accessible to CSPs that are targeting large enterprise customers during 2014 and 2015.

Many organisations within South Africa, Algeria, Kenya, Morocco, and Nigeria appear poised to increase their spending on cloud hosted infrastructure (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) within 2014-2015 and beyond. This, as the economic outlook for the wider region looks strong, with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicting in April 2014 that the growth of the gross domestic product in sub-Saharan Africa is likely to increase to 5.5% this year.

Current picture of cloud within Africa is one of market immaturity

According to the survey, the majority of organisations within South Africa, Algeria, Kenya, Morocco, and Nigeria have moved some virtual workloads, applications or services into cloud hosted IaaS, PaaS or SaaS environments, or have started preparing to do so.

“There is however, a sizeable minority that has yet to formulate a cloud migration strategy on any meaningful scale,” said Chris Willcocks, director: Cloud and Line of Business at SAP Africa who spoke at a media event announcing these results yesterday. “Compared to other global regions such as western Europe, Africa’s cloud adoption levels are only about half by comparison. This only serves to highlight the massive opportunity that exists on the continent for CSPs that are searching for potential new customers.”

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