The Nation Newspaper

Category: e-Business

  • Ooni lauds Airtel for Olojo sponsorship

    The Ooni of Ife, Oba Enitan Adeyeye Ogunwusi has commended Airtel Nigeria for its sponsorship of Olojo Festival – a cultural celebration of the first dusk and dawn in Yoruba land.

    Speaking during the visit of Airtel team to the monarch’s palace, Oba Ogunwusi said: “On behalf of entire people of Oduduwa, I want to appreciate Airtel for being the official partner to Olojo Festival – the celebration of the first dawn. This is a festival that actually accommodate the entire Yoruba race. It’s our new year which started several thousands of years ago.

    “We are upholding our heritage and culture. On behalf of the entire omoluwabi race we appreciate Airtel and we know that they will do better next year. We are enjoying their telecommunications service and we will continue to partner with them. We appreciate the company and their entire staff for their support.”

    Airtel Nigeria Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Segun Ogunsanya, expressed the company’s delight to be associated with the festival.

    “We were very much delighted to be associated with the Olojo festival and that is why we decided to support in our own little way. We also praise Eledumare for a successful event.

    “At Airtel, we are committed to connecting and empowering people. We are also passionate about our cultural heritage. It is for these reasons that we embraced the opportunity to join you in hosting the Olojo Festival. We believe that culture can play a significant role if we must be successful as a nation.  We admire your influential role as custodian of the Yoruba culture and we encourage you to continue to blaze the trail as far as cultural renaissance is concerned,” he said.

    This year’s event themed: “The Olojo Festival: An Impactful Domestic Tourism Product”, was held from Tuesday, September 18 to Monday, October 1, 2018 at Ile-Ife in Osun State with many events for each day.

    Accenture to help AB InBev improve sales and distribution operations in Africa with new Distributor Management System

    Accenture is helping AB InBev (Euronext: ABI) (NYSE: BUD) (MEXBOL: ANB) (JSE: ANH), the world’s largest brewer, better manage its sales and distribution operations in Africa with the Accenture NewsPage Distributor Management System (DMS).

    A fully integrated distributor management and sales force automation system, Accenture DMS covers the complete down-stream supply chain, providing consumer goods companies with accurate, reliable data on secondary sales to help them control promotions; improve productivity; and streamline inventory and sales processes and distributor claims.

    Under the terms of the three-year contract, Accenture is helping AB InBev implement the latest version of DMS for its operations in Africa. This includes the initial roll-out of the system in Mozambique, Zambia, Ghana and Nigeria, as well as the upgrade of the system in Tanzania and Uganda, where AB InBev has already been using DMS for more than three years.

  • Sports betting platform, Betbiga.com unveiled

    A new revolutionary sports betting platform, Betbiga.com has been unvied in the country.
    The arrival marks a turning point in the sports betting business of one of the world’s biggest sports betting market as Betbiga introduces a range of never-before-seen features, odds and bonuses to local sports betting players.
    The promoters of the platfprm, in a statement, said the emergence of Betbiga.com will empower more Nigerians economically and also create job opportunities. This is because  the betting firm plans to quickly scale its operations across the country by rolling out over 30 shops now and by the end of the year, it would have rolled out over 100 retail shops that would double as experience centres all over the country to offer first-class gaming customer experience.
    The firm promises 100% sign up bonuses; 200% bonus on accumulated combo bets; whopping sum of N50, 000, 000 as well as the fastest payout time in the industry – 12 hours or less.
    To help bettors get started, the Betbiga platform is offering several tutorials on how to use the betting platform, a 24/7 customer support unit via chats, calls or mails, as well as a dedicated FAQ section to guide first time players or bettors.
    It also offers all payment options including cash, bank transfer, card withdrawals and uses all payment gateways for fund processing.

  • Dell EMC: PowerVault ME4 Series Good for Business Market

    Dell EMC has officially rolled out new PowerVault ME4 Series storage arrays designed for the small and medium-size business (SMB) market.

    The new entry-level storage products boast enterprise features, quick installation and easy management, the vendor said.

    Faced with fewer internal IT and budget resources than larger enterprise businesses, SMBs still have storage requirements for a wide range of business applications and use cases. With that in mind, the new Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 Series storage arrays are purpose-built and priced for this market segment.

    Dell EMC's Jeff Boudreau

    Dell EMC’s Jeff Boudreau

    “Earlier this year, we made a commitment to simplify and streamline our storage portfolio to make it easier for customers to do business with us,” said Jeff Boudreau, president and general manager of storage at Dell EMC.

    “The new PowerVault ME4 Series is a key part of that strategy at the entry level, designed for customers looking for an affordable, yet fully featured storage array that’s optimized for SAN and DAS virtualized workloads.”

    The new PowerVault ME4 Series family delivers significant increases over previous Dell EMC entry systems in capacity, performance, simplicity and features. Dell EMC built the PowerVault ME4 Series with 75 percent more drives to increase raw storage capacity by 122 percent, while also boosting read IOPS performance by 4X.

    It’s ideal for block-based storage use cases such as video surveillance, high performance computing (HPC), virtualization/VDI, entry SAN, low-cost consolidation, video editing, NoSQL databases, direct attached and OEM solutions, Dell EMC said.

    This month, IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker reported that vendor revenue in worldwide enterprise storage systems increased by more than 21 percent year over year, to $13.2 billion, during the second quarter of 2018. Total capacity shipments were up almost 711 percent, to nearly 112 exabytes during the quarter.

    Dell Inc. was the largest supplier for the quarter, accounting for more than 19 percent of total worldwide enterprise storage systems revenue. HPE/New H3C Group was the second largest, trailing Dell EMC with a little more than 17 percent market share, according to IDC.

  • Phone users open to two new cyber attacks, Checkpoint warns

    “Checkpoint Software Technologies has discovered two major vulnerabilities related to mobile devices over the past month – Man-in-the-Disk which our researchers discovered is a new attack surface for Android apps and FakesApp which researchers discovered is vulnerability in WhatsApp that allows a threat actor to intercept and manipulate messages sent by those in a group or private conversation.”

    ‘The mobile attacks are having a major impact on cooperate organisations and individuals in Nigeria just as the country is quickly becoming a mobile-first country in Africa, with mobile penetration increasing from 53 per cent in 2016 to 84 per cent in 2017.’

    Regional Director, at Check Point, Africa, Rick Rogers, who revealed this at the 2018 Check Point Experience Conference in Lagos, further revealed, African countries are under siege by cybercriminals, with the prevalence of mobile device with almost zero security features. He said Nigeria is inclusive.

    Mobile attacks on Nigerians and companies are growing in prevalence even though major malware like Ransomware, cryptominer, and banking trojans have had a big impact, however, there is still a large vacuum to be exposed, Rogers said.

    He said the attack on Nigeria has an impact on the global market, at the average of 20 per cent – 35 per cent higher between January and August this year, which according to him is not to be taken lightly.

    In his words: “The current threat landscape has evolved into a much more aggressive beast. We are now experiencing Gen V (5th Generation) cyber-attacks, which are characterised as large-scale and fast moving across multiple industries.

    “These sophisticated attacks on mobile, cloud and various enterprise networks, easily bypass conventional defenses being used by most organisations today as they rely on older generations of security.

    “It’s no surprise that mobile attacks are having a major impact on organizations is Nigeria. One of the key markets in Africa, Nigeria is quickly becoming a mobile-first country, with mobile penetration increasing from 53 per cent in 2016 to 84 per cent in 2017.

    “The sheer economy of scale offered by mobile devices is incredibly appealing to cybercriminals. They are using every available opportunity to attack individuals and organisations through their mobile devices, including Apps, particularly because these devices are so popular and people usually do not take as strict precautions when it comes to securing them as they would with their laptops for example.”

    The tech expert explained that there is the need for local businesses to partner with security specialists that can help them remain one step ahead of the game to explain why they have extended their footprint in Africa to Nigeria.

    To ensure that enterprises across Africa have access to the expertise and technology needed to protect themselves from sophisticated attacks on all fronts, the Roger said the company has invested in growing its local teams in North Africa, East Africa, South Africa, SADC, and West Africa through the following appointments:

    “We have Bryan Chuka Ofoegbu – as the Acting Country Manager for Nigeria and West Africa; Grant Hamilton – Country Manager for South Africa; Kendi Ntwiga-Nderitu – Country Manager for Kenya and East Africa; Tony Galvao – Sales Manager, South Africa; Filipe Galvao – Acting Country Manager for SADC (excluding South Africa) and Matan Burstein – Africa SE Manager,” he said.

  • NCC seeks interconnectivity among data centres for e-health

    The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has urged all data centres in the country to a central data centre domiciled at the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) for the promotion of electronic or e-health.

    It strongly believes the country would in the near future, join the league of nations where e-health thrives.

    Its Executive Vice-Chairman, Prof Garba Danbatta, who spoke while receiving a delegation of the University of Abuja, Teaching Hospital, led by its Board Chairman, Dr Sam Jaja, and the Chief Medical Director, Prof Bisallah Ahmed Ekele, who paid a courtesy call at the headquarters of the Commission in Abuja, said the world is moving towards digital transformation age.

    He said: “We are moving gradually towards what I call, the digital transformation of the country, and this, you can do stage by stage. A time will come when everything will be online. If you want the record of a patient referred to you from a different hospital, you just do it with a press of a button and you have the patient’s history.

    “And a patient travelling abroad for medical reason may not have the need to carry the hard copy of his medical history with him. These are all parts of the global e-health architecture that we hope to put in place in the not- too -distant future.”

    He added that ICT could be leveraged to ensure computerisation of records and fast-tracking diagnosis and treatment in the nation’s hospitals.

    “Our intervention in university inter-campus connectivity project has made distance a non-issue by providing you with high speed and reliable high-speed connectivity that will facilitate communication between your campuses.

    “And we see the university teaching hospital as an important component of this project. And then there’s a data centre and facility that will enable you to capture the data of the most important things you are doing, including serving as a repository of student records, academic records, medical records and all kinds of records, which will be difficult to keep in hard copy form. We decided that universities like Unibuja will require data centres that will ensure a reliable source of keeping data, which is retrievable at a press of a button, he said.

    Earlier, Dr Jaja had praised the EVC and the NCC for the significant interventions in the hospital.

    Also speaking on the occasion, Prof Ekele, told the EVC that the NCC’s intervention was the first major assistance the medical institution had received in its 25-year history.

  • Lagos, Visa explore how tech can improve SMEs

    The Lagos State government and global payment technology solutions provider, Visa Inc. say they are exploring how technologies developed by indigenous small and medium enterprises (SMEs) could be deployed to promote the cashless initiative of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

    Speaking on the sideline of Cashless Lagos Hackthorn held at the weekend, the Executive Secretary, Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF), Akintunde Oyebode, said the forum was designed to solve problems around cash management in thevstate.

    He said it was also looking at how to use technologies developed locally by SMEs to solve challenges around the Cashless programme.

    He said: “I am pleased with the winning teams and the possibility of using these solutions to solve payment issues experienced by SMEs. If we are able to help businesses optimise payments and grow, it will not only improve the state’s economy, but also create new jobs. This hackathon further demonstrates how partnerships between government and socially responsible companies can spur development and create double or triple bottom line impact.”

    According to him, the cash prizes won by the teams that pitched would be used to build the actual solution.

    “What you see here is the prototype solution and we hope to take it to the market in the next six months. We also have banks interested in how they support the roll out of the solution for their customers bringing the ecosystem together.

    “This is the second programme we launched this year. We look forward to doing more and partner with relevant institutions. We are funding tech startups and issued work space stations to 50 start-ups already and to 25 more before the end of this month.

    “In total, we are talking about N80 million in work space vouchers. A funding allowance of N200 million is available and this is the first set of funding going to the tech ecosystem,” Oyebode said.

    Leader of Team Blended, which won the star prize of N2million, Olawale Olarenwaju,said the solution is a handy point of sale (PoS) in a mobile device that works like the normal PoS. “Our integration will be powered by Visa because it is big card switching companies that allow us authenticate other cards through Visa,” he said.

     

  • UNAIDS, StarTimes unveil mobile app on HIV/AIDS awareness

    UNAIDS and StarTimes are collaborating on increasing HIV/AIDS awareness among young people with mobile online video application.

    This was unveiled during a meeting with First Lady of the Republic of Malawi Gertrude Mutharika, UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibé and StarTimes Group Vice President Guo Ziqi in China.

    The theme of the meeting was  “Value of new media in African HIV/AIDS Prevention Campaign”.

    Sidibé said: “We have seen progress in most countries today, but the biggest challenge that we face is complacency. The young people don’t have information, they don’t have knowledge, so they don’t protect themselves…So, information, knowledge and education, and that’s why StarTimes is very important for us.

    “I just want to say sharing information, bringing knowledge and making sure that we can change young people will be key for ending AIDS.”

    Sidibé said for most African countries, 70 per cent of the population are below the age of 35 and they are not getting information. “Our recent approach will completely change the situation and help us to go for a generation free of AIDS,” he added.

    With smartphone use and internet penetration soaring, Africa is set for a communication way revolution. Similarly in Europe, US and China, more and more African young people, get used to watching stream videos on phones.

    Ziqi said: “Based on this trend, StarTimes launched its video streaming service in African market with StarTimes App in June. Within three  months, StarTimes App has had 8 million downloads and the figure is expected to be 15 million at the end of this year.” He added that StarTimes App right now is streaming the “Zero Discrimination” PSAs as a trial cooperation with UNAIDS through the online video.

  • FEC okays digital identity ecosystem roadmap

    The Federal Executive Council (FEC) has approved the commencement of the implementation of a strategic roadmap for digital identity ecosystem in the country.

    The digital ecosystem is a framework that leverages existing capabilities and infrastructure of distinct government agencies and private sector organisations to carry out enrolment of Nigerians and legal residents into the National Identity Database (NIDB) as well as issuance of digital identity, known as the National Identification Number (NIN) to bring about a credible and robust identity management system.

    The FEC approval will bring into full force the implementation of the provisions of the NIMC Act 23, 2007, which include the enforcement of the mandatory use of the National Identification Number (NIN) by January 1, 2019, and the application of appropriate sanctions and penalties on defaulters as provided under Section 28 of the NIMC Act and Regulations.

    Speaking on the approval, Director-General/CEO of NIMC, Engr. Aliyu Abubakar Aziz, said it was in line with the Federal Government’s efforts to reposition the country’s status in the global economy, towards achieving the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) launched in April 2017.

    According to him, the ERGP was designed “as an omnibus strategy for the government to meet the critical needs of the citizenry in areas such as food security, energy, transport, human capital development, but more critically developing a local digital economy.”

    He expressed gratitude to President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, as well as members of the FEC, National Assembly, the World Bank, the French development agency – AFD, the European Union/EIB and members of the Harmonisation Committee, including industry stakeholders whose expertise and contributions fostered harmonious discussion and created the platform for the development of the roadmap.

    He said all agencies of government and the private sector who are directly or indirectly into the business of data capture and service provision requiring identification of persons should note that: guidelines, processes, procedures for licensing public and private sector organisation will be published soon; enforcement of the mandatory use of the NIN for services and transactions based on the Mandatory Use of the NIN Regulations 2017, will commence; and duly licensed organisations will be required to carry out the front end services of the Identity Ecosystem (data capture, authentication and verification services, etc.) and in compliance with the provisions set out in the Nigeria Biometrics Standard.

     

  • New entrant, Tambo promises jobs

    A new entrant into the Nigerian mobile phone market, Tambo, has promised to create jobs and complement government efforts at developing the economy.

    The Managing Director, Tambo Mobile Telecom Nigeria,  Roy Jiang, who spoke during the launch of the brand in Lagos at the weekend, said the firm wants to build a business ecosystem with its dealers and partners that will create jobs, add to the economy and promote sustainability in the social and business environment.

    He said: “Tambo is an innovative mobile phone brand backed by a forward-looking bold and caring company. Our products are designed to be ahead of the curve and the consumers are always our priority at the end to redefine technology and disrupt the mobile market in a positive and modern way by adding value to our customers, staff and business partners. Tambo has two product series the Super phones and Power phones. “With these two distinct but value-driven phones, Tambo plans to change the game in the market by putting the power to get the best out of mobile devices without breaking the bank.”

    He said the core of the firm’s business philosophy is transparency, humility, honesty and care, adding that with the Superphone and Power phone categories, value would be delivered to the Nigerian mobile market with innovative products delivered with a best-in-class customer service positions. “In the next few months, our mobile products and services will take Nigeria by storm; we are delighted to finally start the journey in building a brand that Nigeria at home and abroad can be proud of. The brand aims to put the customers at the heart of the operations with the introduction of customer oriented after-sales service and propositions such as the 100 days after sales support for all our mobile devices purchased from our accredited dealers and retailers. Our customer care lines are also open and reachable 24/7 365 days,” Jiang said.

  • ISON, Avaya Harp on Improved Customer Experience Management in Nigeria

    ISON Technologies, in partnership with Avaya, recently hosted an exclusive Customer Experience Management (CEM) forum to address the needs to build connected experiences for today’s digital world in Nigeria.

    The event which took place at the Intercontinental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos, was well attended by industry experts and IT professionals.

    The Customer Experience Event provided invaluable insight into how businesses can achieve greater value from Avaya’s communications solutions and iSON Technologies and how these jointly can solve some of Nigeria’s pressing business challenges. The event also provided an environment for leaders to gain knowledge on recent advancements in designing, building and operating the right technology to underpin business growth. 

    At the event, the Vice President and Head of Services, iSON Technologies, Saurabh Jain assured customers of iSON Technologies’ commitment to providing a full stack of IT Services across the lifecycle of business design. “As a strategic Digital transformation and operations partner in the domain of IT services, infrastructure and datacenter design & management in Africa and Middle East, iSON Technologies has narrowed its focus on customer experience management solutions and technology in Africa”, he stated.

    Also speaking at the event was Karam Jabi, Managing Director for Avaya in Africa, who expressed confidence in the successful partnership of Avaya and iSON Technologies. He said: “Businesses around the world are looking to simple and efficient ways to integrate emerging technologies to differentiate for talent retention and customer loyalty.  With Avaya being a global leader in the communications industry for the digital world, we look at partners like iSON to bring our customers’ vision to reality.

    This year, Avaya is one of two companies named a Worldwide Leader in both Contact Center Infrastructure and Unified Communications by Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrants.

    More than 90% of the Fortune 100 are Avaya customers, and companies in over 170 countries around the world choose Avaya contact center solutions to transform their customer service and support operations. Avaya’s comprehensive, end-to-end portfolio helps drive digital transformation by providing a secure, flexible platform, the ability to create and integrate applications from Avaya, in house or from third parties, and the workforce management tools to ensure continuous improvement.

    Avaya’s flagship contact center offering, Avaya Oceana™, enables omnichannel capabilities for a personalized, multi-touch customer experience, a context-rich agent environment and seamless interactions and handoffs between mobile, self, and assisted service.

    ISON Technologies is concerned with developing skills and leveraging resources pools in Africa. So far, iSON Technologies aims to deliver over 1 billion voice traffic transactions management per year for various enterprises, 70% market share on delivering services to telecom companies in Africa on Avaya platform, 99.5% plus availability ensured for the business to deliver optimum customer service, 100 plus applications are being managed and enhanced every quarter, 100 plus skilled resources on various products of Avaya technology and 25 plus core team of application development across customer experience platform.