HP Unveils Cloud Computing At Annual Customers Forum In Dakar
Hewlett Packard West Africa, Intel and Microsoft recently gathered a crop of it's A to C - level customers, partners and retailers for a-three day customers forum in far away Dakar, Senegal.
- (1888PressRelease) July 20, 2011 - The Forum, themed: Technology Live, is an annual event that is organised purposely for market integration, knowledge gathering, new product demonstration and for stakeholders networking.
This year's edition, 7th in the series, was held at the Radison Blu Hotel in Dakar, Senegal a fortnight ago. It was attended by about 120 participants made up of clients from the corporate and government establishments in Nigeria. Others in attendance were C-level customers, partners, wholesalers and retailers from its Nigerian and Ghana markets.
At the forum, HP was able to take participants through its new product development and future plans for the West African market. The occasion also focused on the business and environmental challenges and opportunities as being experienced by both HP and its customers. There was a presentation and product demonstration of some of the latest IT solutions which HP as an industry leader, has recently developed in order to help reduce the gap between customers' needs and what organisational IT infrastructure can offer for optimum deliverable. The main focus of the discussions was cloud computing which is an on-demand provision of computation resources through a computer network. Cloud based applications and services can support any type of software application in use today. It was explained that organizations can have consultations to see if the cloud will work for them and how they can gradually migrate to either the private or public cloud.
In the key note address and other papers presented at the forum by various Chief Executive Officers, Chief Information Officers, HP clients and dealers; participants were able to garner a lot of information on current trends in the IT industry.
One of the outstanding presentations was from the Chairman of Microsoft Africa, Dr. Cheick Diarra who gave an inspiring address on African Technology Vision. His address touched on the reality of life in Africa, the role of science and technology in accelerating development and how all stakeholders can make a real difference in the socio economic development of Africa; using information technology to drive the needed growth.
According to him "I have been, and will continue to be inspired by the work being done by my peers at HP and Intel, the test of the relevance of our science is ultimately in its application for resolving common problems. Today, I ask you to take up our collective challenge to address the practical applications of your invention; it is indeed not only an opportunity, but our responsibility", Dr. Diarra stated.
Others who spoke at the 3-day forum were the Managing Director of INTEL who stated that "Intel will help businesses implement cloud computing solutions that are federated, automated, and client-aware". What this means is that new approaches to IT automation will offer the promise to swiftly respond to the demands of users in new, cost-effective ways. Federated clouds will allow rapid scale of computing resources, while client-aware clouds deliver optimized applications to any end-user device
In the course of the conference HP customers and other stakeholders were able to express their needs, and specific industry challenges. They requested for "more effective collaboration with HP in order for us to discover outstanding market solutions" while leveraging on HP's matched portfolio, size, and scope.
Among organisations that attended from Nigeria are: United Bank For Africa, EcoBank, Spring Bank, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) etc.
The Customers Forum, according to HP office in Lagos, had been previously hosted in various West African countries such as Republic of Benin, The Gambia and Togo. Explaining the reason why it was being held annually outside the operating market environment, Ms. Ijeoma Onyiuke, Marketing Manager, Hewlett Packard, West Africa stated that, We feel that it is our responsibility to inform our customers on the most innovative technologies, we focused on cloud computing, converged infrastructure, networking and software to move their businesses to the next level. The tech. live! event was themed EVOLVE, our aim was to equip our local market with the best in class technology tools badly needed after a long period of recession in order to bounce back and evolve to new heights to play alongside global competitors.
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