New global ICT trends: How technology can aid faster economic recovery

Nigeria’s economy over the years has been predicated upon crude oil production and sales. But going by current realities, oil is no longer a viable economic mainstay. Globally, the price has continued to nosedive and economies which made the mistake of putting their eggs in one basket are quickly looking for a way out. Diversification, has however, been identified as the viable solution and that is where Nigeria is headed. Eventually, knowing what to diversify into is as important as the diversification itself.

Meanwhile, several Information and Communications Technology, ICT professionals have argued that Technology is the alternative to what oil cannot give Nigeria at the moment. They back up these arguments with the turnaround several economies of the world are recording now, courtesy of technological developments.

That argument was also carried further, Monday, when one of Nigeria’s national dailies, BusinessDay Newspapers gathered the best of industry practitioners in Lagos to discuss the possibility of ICT presenting viable alternative to oil.

The event under the theme “Beyond oil: ICT as a viable alternative” xrayed the potentials that support ICT as a viable candidate for this replacement and also highlighted some of the bottlenecks that could militate against immediate impact.

Interestingly, with every speaker, from the Founder and CEO of Computer Warehouse Group, Mr Austin Okere, CEO Rack centre, Mr Ayotunde Coker, Director Lagos Angel Networks, Mr Collins Onuegbu, CEO MTN Nigeria, Mr Ferdi Moolman, the direction was clear-Nigeria should upgrade as a full digital economy. A digital economy is essentially a global network of new economic activities enabled by technology and data. This new economy has the potentials of opening a wide horizon of possibilities that were unknown or unthinkable before.

Incidentally, Nigeria has witnessed a bit of that transformation with the liberalisation and opening up of the telecommunications sector of the economy in 2001. That move threw open several other sub sectors like the financial institutions, e­ -commerce, data centers, computer games, voice over IP communication, among others that leveraged on the possibilities of technology to blossom.

Global trends

The good news is that other current global ICT trends are still suggesting that the power of technology innovations are heavily leaned towards the emerging markets, where Nigeria obviously calls the shots. Coker, the Rack Centre CEO, said that his company has carried out researches to benchmark other reports and found out that there is an addressable market in the data centre business. For him, the data centre business was going to explode in the country. The reason according to him was that the operators are suddenly realising that if their networks fail and their customers churn, they were going to lose tremendous businesses.

Again, he disclosed that same way, they are beginning to understand that trusting their networks with local based data centres was far more profitable and reliable than hosting their networks abroad where it will surely take a few rigmaroles to recover if there is a sudden occurrence. Having discovered this trend, Coker said Rack centre was going to invest over $200 million on its data centre network, in addition to the hundred millions of dollars they have spent already.

Angel Investors

Collins Onuegbu in his own observation of current ICT trends said that Nigeria was fast leaving behind the unfortunate experience where new businesses suffered for several years, to scale, due to lack of funding and support. For him the trend being experienced globally is the gradual rise in the number of Angel investors who put seed funds into start-up businesses in order to help the scale.

His Lagos Angel Network, boasts of a pool of companies and businessmen who have achieved business edge somewhere and decided to put money together to help growing businesses. So far, the network has provided funds and as wel