Technology & Africa
After 4 workshops with 4 different Microsoft partners, engaging with roughly 40-50 people working on Technology, I learned a few things about technology in Botswana & Africa. For a country that is growing so fast, technology is a key part of their success. Meeting them in a timing like this, when they already started adopting some cloud like Office 365, with about 30% penetration so far, but still, when they are not aware of Azure at all, is practically the perfect timing.
In some areas, the experience was like travelling in a time machine 5–10 years back. For example, when I asked for the average internet connection, for their average corporate customer, their answer was… 2–4Mbit. That is probably what I had in my home back in the year 2003. As for the last two years, the slowest home connectivity in Israel is 10 times than that, and Israel is not a country that excel in Internet connectivity.
So, here I am trying to pitch public cloud to this audience, when the closest datacenter to Botswana located in Amsterdam, about 9,000 Km away. And on top of that, their internet connectivity speed is as slow as dial-up.
In other areas, Botswana really had the lead. For example, talking about Recoverability options in case of Disasters. Israel is prune to missile attacks, frequent storms in winter, major earthquakes, and more. Botswana, on the other hand, appears to be in a good geographical location, with very little exposure to any of these. Probably the biggest natural disaster possible here is drought. So, doing proper Disaster Recovery is not that interesting, both from the probability, and also with lack of business requirement for availability. Just for the sake of example, the Botswana Government official public website, that I’m monitoring from Azure in the last 3 days, had an availability of 87% at this timeframe.
It was interesting to speak about topics like Chat-bots (“Bots” by itself is just a shortcut for Botswana). This is a new area of innovation that most technology companies currently have investments in: Microsoft, as well as Google, Facebook, Slack, etc. The trend is to move to invisible UI, and build a software that you can just interact with naturally, in a human-like conversation. Well, guess what? Africa has been doing it for years. This is an example for innovation that is led by necessity, as lots of the phones in Africa are feature-phones with no ability to run applications. Most of the advertisements I saw on TV or newspaper do not invite you to surf to http website, instead they invite you to start a conversation with their Bot! Something like “Send the word quote to number 51512”. In many areas in Africa, they even have a full operated bank and credit system working purely on SMS, only because in Africa, this is what exists.
I believe cloud can make at least the same revolution for Africa as Mobile. This is a technology that enables to leapfrog across other companies with heavy datacenter investments, and instead of chasing them, just run on mega hyper-scale datacenters with the latest cutting-edge technologies.
Probably the biggest issue here is price, and this is where I think I’ve had most success. I showed them how for some services cloud economy can really deliver amazing things using single dollars, or even for free. After showing them a service, I tried and ask them what do they believe the price of the service. Most said this is 100$–500$ service, when one guy even answered 20,000$. Then I told them it is… FREE. They were really amazed.
But, at the end of the day, it is not a question of technology, rather the people using it, and how they will use it. The people I met were special. They were intelligent, gentle, open-minded and most of them speak better English than me. I did not catch them smile often, but they do have a good sense of humor, and can make some funny jokes at times. Overall, it is hard not to imagine one of these people in a different reality in Israel/US/Europe doing a lot of great stuff. Birth lottery is harsh.
