When Big Data, Cloud and Internet of Things Technologies can enable African Startups become Disruptive.

The new technologies making waves now revolve around Big Data, Cloud and Internet of Things. We are really getting so familiar with these words these days. Am sure this is a very exciting times for anyone, no matter where in the world you live in, you don’t even have to be a techie to start using these technologies to create something big. What is most interesting is that the wide range of applications of these new technologies give everyone a flexible option to start a new business or improve an existing business in a fast, easy and secured environment. It’s now affordable to benefit from the technologies of existing big companies like Oracle.

For someone who is curious, the new questions to ask will be, which sectors of the economy do I want to disrupt, how fast can I start this idea and how well can I leverage the new technologies at hand to bring these ideas fruition.

I remember sharing with you the need for African Startups to see the future of building businesses in Africa that can compete with other businesses around the world. Today as I attend the Oracle Open World in San Francisco California, and listen to Thomas Kurian, the President Product Development at Oracle and Larry Elision the founder and the CTO of Oracle, I see an increasing opportunity for anyone in any part of the world to build a business around these new technologies . The interesting thing about these technologies is that the complexity and security implications often associated with them have been demystified, be it the platforms as a service, Software or applications as a service and Infrastructure as a service. These three layers of the Cloud offer great opportunity to build new digital businesses in Africa. Essentially, the gap between imagination and reality is increasingly closing.

For Africa where we experience a lot challenges in Infrastructure, it might just be the opportunity for young people to build businesses that will disrupt known businesses in different sectors of the economy.

We have seen companies like Uber, Airbnb and many others you can see under this category are leveraging either platform as a service, software as a service or Infrastructure as a service to change the way businesses are done in the sector of economy they play in. Check the time it takes for such businesses to scale, check the impact they are making and many more facts you can deduce, that’s exactly what am talking about.

In Africa some people are already doing it, but they are also forced to start looking at the traditional model of doing businesses.

The banking sector, education, Security, health, ecommerce, transportation, media, entertainment you name them are sectors yearning for such ideas. In fact every sector needs disruptive ideas in Africa even governance.

Am glad that countries like Botswana is making efforts in partnership with Oracle and other companies to increase cloud adoption in order to create solutions to challenging situations in their country and at the end create employment for her citizens. We should all think of innovative ways to do whatever we want to do using these new technologies because they are great opportunities.