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Vodacom Business aims to leverage fast network for growth

VUYANI JARANA
Vodacom Business has made significant investments in last-mile fibre connections to provide high-speed fibre-based services for businesses

VUYANI JARANA Vodacom Business has made significant investments in last-mile fibre connections to provide high-speed fibre-based services for businesses

2nd October 2015

By: Schalk Burger

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

  

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Telecommunications division Vodacom Business will leverage the group’s fast and high-quality network – a result of continuous investment in it – to grow its share of revenue contribution to the group from 17.9% to 30% within three years, says Vodacom Business Chief Officer Vuyani Jarana.

Vodacom Group has an extensive fibre-optic network throughout Africa, as well as satellite and cellular connectivity. It will leverage this to provide converged and modern services for clients on the continent, especially large multinational organisations preferring to deal with a single, local service provider in the countries where it is operating.

“Vodacom Business has made significant investments in last-mile fibre connections to provide high-speed fibre-based services for businesses.”

Since 2012, Vodacom has achieved a sufficient critical mass of network capillarity and networking infrastructure, including its newest high-technology data centres, to provide diverse services for all enterprises, including converged services and enterprise mobility solutions for large organisations on the continent, says Jarana.

“We can provide rich services and rich mobility services to digitally transform clients’ businesses in preparation for the digital economic landscape arising from the smartphone and mobile device penetration, as well as the digitisation of many private and public services and functions,” he adds.

Further, Vodacom has sufficient scope and network capillarity to provide services to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) at the correct scale and price in addition to its typical large-enterprise customers, including software services, hosting and business software services.

“Our strategy is to defend our 54% local market share and grow it by providing additional services and functionality to our existing clients, and by gaining new clients, especially SMEs. Our pan-African strategy is similar and will leverage our existing network infrastructure, points of presence and people in 14 African countries, besides South Africa, to serve local and large multinational clients.”

Jarana mentions that the speed of Vodacom’s broadband network and its ability to aggregate network traffic and provide fibre connections for businesses enables Vodacom to provide seamless network experiences for clients in Africa, including providing connectivity from a client’s sites to enterprise resource planning systems hosted in one territory.

Meanwhile, the division has established a dedicated machine-to-machine (M2M) unit, and Jarana notes significant opportunities in this area.

Mobile healthcare and mobile agricultural services are two key areas of focus for Vodacom and they dovetail with the M2M capabilities, as many of the medical devices and agricultural machinery can be connected to provide machine-generated data. This data are then added to ancillary or complementary data, such as patient medical history, rainfall or meteorological data, to provide intelligence for the farmers or healthcare professionals.

“Satellite connectivity links even the most remote areas of the continent. We foresee, and have included it in our strategy accordingly, significant benefits arising from M2M communications, including in infrastructure, human mobility, healthcare, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, trade and smart cities.

“Further, given our presence in the 15 African countries, we can also provide hosted platforms and services for private and public organisations or governments; this enables them to rapidly deploy new functionalities, for example e-government services, which provide good performance without significant investment. This is a key strategic benefit arising from our network and points of presence on the continent,” concludes Jarana.

Story highlights:

* Vodacom Business aims to increase its contribution to group revenue to 30% within three years by providing broad services to small and large businesses across its Africa footprint.
* Fibre-based networks, including fibre to business, satellite connectivity and machine-to-machine capabilities enable Vodacom Business to provide services for many different industries matched to their connectivity constraints and needs.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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