Alpheus Mangale, Cisco

Cisco South Africa is looking to the public sector and the telcos to drive growth over the next few years, while globally the ever-increasing connectivity driving the “Internet of everything” is heralding the next generation of big data and networking. Cisco executives laid out the company’s vision at its Cisco Expo South Africa 2013 in Sun City.

Alpheus Mangale, MD of Cisco South Africa, said he expects increased activity in the public sector over the next five years. “In government, there are ambitious goals to connect South Africans with universal broadband and new services. Improving healthcare, public services – every department is making investments.”

Education is a major area of focus for Cisco, with its networking academy, community knowledge centres and similar programmes aimed at increasing the level of ICT skills. Mangale hopes to create partnerships to extend those programmes.

Mangale said he hopes to see the reestablishment of a national ICT advisory council this year. “I expect to see [ANC deputy president] Cyril Ramaphosa driving it, and we want to take an active role in that council.”

The telcos are also on Cisco’s radar. “There will be major opportunities in SA in telecoms as the carrier networks continue to move to IP,” Mangale said, and the government’s plan to extend broadband Internet to 100% of the population by 2020 will create opportunities for networking companies. But this will require greater government involvement, he said.

INTERNET OF EVERYTHING

While Africa’s deployment of online and mobile technologies continues, the global Internet is deepening even faster, leading to what Cisco dubs the “Internet of everything”, with analysts predicting 50 billion connected devices by 2020. Those devices, including mobile devices, industrial sensors, medical equipment and everything in between, will increase demands on the world’s network infrastructure by orders of magnitude, said Howard Charney, senior VP at Cisco.

“While we may feel as if we’re wired up every minute of the day, connectivity only covers 1% of what could be connected,” Charney said. “Ninety-nine percent of the world is still not connected.”

Charney predicts that increased connectivity could boost industrial and agricultural output by trillions of dollars. Beyond simple effi ciency gains, entirely new markets could open up, including medical research enabled by improved access to data.

“We throw away valuable data all the time. IDC says only 0.05% of world’s available data is being mined for value,” Charney said. “Big data and the Internet of everything are going to have a huge impact on public health.”

Charney points to research underway in Canada, which mined the vast volumes of data collected, but usually discarded, by medical sensors on infants in ICUs. Identifying patterns in data allowed the Artemis project to isolate infections 24 hours earlier than before, and could lead to many saved lives. In Africa, crowd-sourced data is helping identify and control disease outbreaks. New research is being driven by high-volume, collaborative data models, Charney said. “Researchers typically guard their data, and companies protect it, but those barriers are breaking down. You don’t win by locking up your data, you win by putting your data out there and collaborating with others.”

Some projects require a new generation of technology entirely. South Africa is leading the prestigious Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project, which will produce petabytes of data to share with researchers around the world. “The SKA project will require long haul links with capacity greater than current global Internet traffi c. That’s one project requiring more bandwidth than the entire Internet today,” Charney said.