Embrace digital solutions for growth - Avaya boss

Hatem Hariri, Avaya’s Managing Director for Africa, has called on African countries to apply available digital strategies to many facets of their economies in order to achieve operational excellence in an increasingly competitive world.

Technological advancement in many African countries has been slow, largely because of the limited infrastructure to spur the application of digital solutions to health care, education, manufacturing and agriculture among others.

In Ghana, the growing Internet penetration rate and adoption and use of smart phones shows a huge potential for the application of digital solutions to the economy’s various sectors.

Mr. Hariri said: “Governments want to be more accessible to their citizens–that means communications, which is where we help deliver smart government; making life easier for citizens by working in partnership with government organisations to transform everything to digital. Client-tailored and outcomes-focused digital and smart services elevate organisations of every scale and accelerate growth through their digital journeys.

“While Africa’s predominantly young, tech-savvy population means awareness of the so-called Third Platform technologies – Big data and analytics, cloud, social and mobile – is high, adoption is still uneven given the diverse nature of the market. However, it very much depends on the country.

“Some countries have good bandwidth, good infrastructure and good education, and are therefore very advanced in their adoption of new technology. If you look at countries like South Africa, Morocco and Algeria, our cloud value proposition is gaining tremendous traction; how we integrate video as a service, unified communications and so on. Many countries here have very advanced technology solutions that are ahead of other regions – for instance, we have seen the use of mobile phones to conduct banking transactions being pioneered in sub-Saharan Africa,” he said.

“Avaya is investing more and more into the region; we are increasingly looking at what other countries we can invest in because of the potential here. Africa is the hidden jewel of the world that is set to become the shining jewel. We are in Africa to stay and will participate in and contribute to the continent’s growth,” he said.

Avaya has partnered Hiperdist - an IT distribution company - to offer its integrated communication solutions to the Ghanaian market and 27 others on the continent.

“Avaya and Hiperdist have signed a collaboration in Africa for 27 countries. We are introducing Avaya to the partners of IT in Ghana. Hiperdist has been in IT distribution for the past 17 years. This is a new venture that we have started. What we have here are the latest products in terms of telecommunication and networking.

“The technology is for someone who has a 5-user office to someone who has a 50,000-user office. Everybody can become a client of Avaya. Most of the customer service centres in the world are run through Avaya technology,” a representative of Hiperdist told the B&FT at an event in Accra to officially announce the partnership and introduce Avaya’s offering to the Ghanaian market.

Avaya is a recognised innovator, leading business communications for the digital age. Avaya delivers smart global solutions and technologies for customer and team engagement, unified communications and collaboration, contact centre and customer experience management, and networking. It services large enterprises, mid-market companies, small businesses, and government organisations around the world.

Avaya’s solutions bring people together with the right information at the right time in the right context, helping to enable a higher level of engagement among customers, teams, employees and partners to improve efficiency and quickly address critical business challenges.