Networking equipment supplier and network management for the Internet company Cisco has unveiled a R215-milion investment to set up an information and communication technology (ICT) innovation hub centre, in Pretoria.

The Cisco Innovation Hub Technology Centre (CIHTC), a public private partnership, would be an advanced technology incubation centre, aimed at fostering and developing local skills, intellectual property, entrepreneurship and solution development capabilities in the local ICT sector.

Cisco said that these initiatives were expected to drive a R1-billion gross domestic product effect over an initial five-year period.

Cisco South Africa MD Steve Midgley said the company was investing in this initiative to ensure that South Africa had enough skills, solution creation capabilities and intellectual property to benefit from broadband when the “revolution really kicks off”.

“South Africa is on the brink of entering a broadband boom,” he said.

“This will change the way people live and work – giving the public sector and business the opportunity to gain significant efficiencies, to drive productivity enhancements, to achieve cost reductions and to gain access to new market segments within their existing business models. It will also create an enabling platform from which new business models can be created.”

The CIHTC would create a minimum of 200 direct jobs and 800 indirect employment opportunities.

Initiatives, such as an InnovationLab, a global talent acquisition programme, the Cisco Netversity, an entrepreneur institute and a software development programme would be based at the new 3 000-m² centre at the Innovation Hub.

The InnovationLab focused on developing technology solutions to solve common business challenges in South Africa. It has been running since the beginning of the year and was currently developing solutions in education and crime prevention.

The Cisco global talent acquisition programme (GTAP) aimed to tackle the growing shortage of skilled networking professionals in the country. The GTAP has absorbed the first group of students to create high-level network entrepreneurs at a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) level in an accelerated form. The company aimed to create a minimum of 120 CCIE-level network engineers over a five-year period for the local market, at its own cost.

Another skills development programme, Cisco Netversity, aimed to create some 150 network design engineers through an experiential architecture and design programme.

The company would also aim to train 250 entrepreneurs through its Cisco Entrepreneur Institute. The first student intake would be before the end of the year.

At the CIHTC, Cisco would also establish a software development programme to focus on developing applications for its own business requirements. However, it stated that while the applications would initially be used to automate its own processes, it would make the source code available to local software entrepreneurs to innovate upon and offer local software innovations for sale in the domestic or export markets.