IBM Launches New Cape Town Africa Innovation Center to Help Fuel Skills Growth in South Africa
September 17 2009 - 9:01AM
PR Newswire (US)
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Sept. 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM
(NYSE: IBM) today opened an Africa Innovation Center in Cape Town
to foster the development of information technology and business
skills and to expand its customer and business partner ecosystem in
the region. The center will help local businesses develop and
deploy new technologies that support key digital infrastructure
opportunities in government, banking, insurance, retail, and travel
and transportation industries. (Logo:
http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO ) The IBM
Africa Innovation Center in Cape Town will provide local customers,
business partners, start-up companies, independent software vendors
(ISVs), IT professionals, and the academic community with access to
training workshops, consulting services, a broad technical
infrastructure, and hands-on assistance to help solve business
challenges and bring new technologies to market. The center
supports IBM's efforts to help grow the burgeoning local IT
ecosystem and is a key addition to IBM's US$120 million, two-year
market expansion investment in sub-Saharan Africa. As the second
IBM Africa Innovation Center established in Sub-Saharan Africa, the
Cape Town center will help connect businesses and academics with
the Johannesburg center, which opened last year, and additional
local IBM initiatives. The new center will support skills
development by demonstrating and providing training and access to
open standards-based and emerging technologies such as cloud
computing, Web 2.0, service oriented architecture (SOA) and energy
efficient IT solutions. Through its expansion efforts, IBM has
grown its South African business partner community by 40 percent
since the beginning of 2008, adding more than 200 new companies to
a group that now totals over 700 local resellers, solution
integrators and ISVs today. In Cape Town alone, 140 ISVs offer
solutions that run on IBM software and hardware. "Cape Town
possesses a strong innovative spirit, and with access to the
appropriate skills and resources, local businesses and academics
can collaborate to build a vibrant technical community," said
Oliver Fortuin, General Manager, IBM Sub-Saharan Africa. "The new
Africa Innovation Center demonstrates IBM's commitment to help
build the IT ecosystem to provide the necessary tools for
developing 21st century skills and driving economic growth in the
region." As part of IBM's efforts to support the growing South
African technical community, the company has helped develop
curricula and provided no cost access to software, hardware and
industry experts to ten South African higher education
institutions, including the University of Cape Town and
Stellenbosch University, over the past year. Additionally, IBM has
seen substantial growth among South African IT professionals taking
advantage of IBM developerWorks, the largest and most visited
global site to gain technology skills. Over 10,600 unique South
African developers are visiting developerWorks each month in 2009,
gaining access to software tools and code, IT standards and best
practices, and skills training in technologies such as IBM and open
source software, Linux, Java, XML and cloud computing. IBM
Innovation Centers The Cape Town IBM Africa Innovation Center,
based in Century City, North of Cape Town, joins the growing
worldwide network of 47 IBM Innovation Centers. In 2008, IBM
Innovation Centers assisted more than 22,000 business partners with
workshops, seminars and consultations to help build their skills,
lower development costs and reduce time-to-market. Silvermoon
Business Systems, a Cape Town-based insurance solutions and
software company and IBM Business Partner, has taken advantage of
free resources to test and validate its solution on IBM DB2 and
WebSphere software at the IBM Africa Innovation Center in
Johannesburg. "Through support from the IBM Africa Innovation
Center in Johannesburg, we've been able to deliver our
enterprise-level insurance software components on multiple IBM
platforms which has opened up new opportunities for us in the
global market," said Quenten Friday, founder and director of
Silvermoon Business Systems. "The establishment of the IBM
Innovation Center in Cape Town will provide an immense resource to
Silvermoon and the hundreds of other local IT companies through
education, IT and marketing resources, and the ability to host
customer engagements with IBM here in our backyard." Press
contacts: Lon Levitan IBM Media Relations 512-286-7216 Bandile
Sikwane IBM Media Relations +27113025927
http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO DATASOURCE:
IBM CONTACT: Lon Levitan, +1-512-286-7216, , or Bandile Sikwane,
+27113025927, , both of IBM Media Relations Web Site:
http://www.ibm.com/
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