Seacom entry stirs up cloud business

By Frankline Sunday

The fibre optic cable company, Seacom, has entered the Kenyan cloud services market. The move is likely to see prices for cloud-computing services go down with small and medium-sized enterprises emerging as winners.

Through its new subsidiary, Pamoja Cloud Services, Seacom’s roll-out model is to provide wholesale cloud based services to re-sellers, who will act as service vendors.

 “Pamoja Cloud Services is focused on a wider market, including the fast-growing SME segment, and will leverage off Seacom’s infrastructure,” said Mr Albie Bester, Pamoja General Manager. “The exposure to partnerships and Africa’s growing mobile and Internet market will entrench its service model.”

Cloud computing helps business organisations cut down on technological costs.  It facilitates the outsourcing of core functions such as data storage, accounting and email to third parties.

This frees up the organisation’s technical and financial resources to be channelled towards other key areas. At the same time, it saves up on hardware and operational costs. Cloud computing has gained currency in the developed world. But it still in its nascent stages in the local market, growing marginally over the past three years.

The move by Seacom is likely to stoke competition in the IT market that have spent billions setting up cloud vending services. Safaricom in partnership with Seaven Seas Technologies has in the last two years spent close to Sh3.5 billion developing Safaricom Cloud.

The cloud-based infrastructure provides software and back up services to enterprises in the Kenyan market. Internet service provider Access Kenya is one of the first companies that have entered a partnership with Pamoja and is looking to use its established client base to drive up adoption of the new offering particularly among SMEs.

“We have come to the realisation that we are yet to fully explore Cloud opportunities and by coming together with Pamoja Cloud Services, we will be able to offer Kenyan SMEs with cloud computing services and enable them compete at the same level with larger organisations,” said Jonathan Somen Group chief executive, AccessKenya.