COUNTRY FOCUS: NIGERIA
is opportunity, and personally I see an
opportunity for SD-WAN providers in
this space.
Are there any specific projects
that you have been involved in
recently in Nigeria that you can
talk about?
“
THERE ARE ALSO
MANY EXCITING PROJECTS AND
DEVELOPMENTS HAPPENING
THAT ARE DESIGNED TO BOOST
THE ECONOMY.
Yes, our message is resonating extremely
well in the market due to our fresh
approach of not just ‘shifting tin’ but
focusing on providing customers with
a platform that makes the underlying
infrastructure invisible and focuses on
running applications where they are best
suited from a costs, performance and
efficiency perspective.
We’ve recently landed one of only a few
G2K customers in the entire West, East and
Central Africa region. This is an exceptionally
exciting win for Nutanix and a project that
will showcase the true value that we can
provide, especially from both a technical
and business perspective. Our mandate from
the client is to better enable business using
technology and the client will be running all
of their core applications on our platform –
something we are already delivering on.
Remember some customers in Africa
haven’t even virtualised yet, this
makes leapfrog technologies like
hyperconvergence and web-scale
approaches very attractive to them.
We don’t fixate on the where, we have
customers in Nigeria where we are
assisting with their own environment
(data centre) as well as helping to
consolidate their workloads across
different public cloud environments.
Nigeria is the most populated
country in Africa. Do you think it can
cater for the demand in terms of IT?
Rowen Grierson, Regional Director West,
East and Central Africa at Nutanix
Yes, Nigeria is the most populated country
in Africa, it is also one of the fastest growing
populations in the world. With this comes a
growing number of banks, service providers
and fintechs pushing new services into the
market to try and grab market share from a
young, tech hungry population.
There are also many exciting projects and
developments happening that are designed
to boost the economy. This includes the
building of a new oil refinery just outside of
Lagos that will allow Nigeria to refine their
own oil (planned to be opened at the end
of 2020 to eventually refine 650,000 barrels
per day). So, everywhere you look there is
growth, promise and opportunity.
This coupled, with its appetite for
technology as a solution to its many
socio-economic challenges, highlights that
Nigeria is ready for a technology challenge.
Its government is also looking to better
retain and develop IT skills where it can, as
well as invest in technologies, like Nutanix
that don’t require exhaustive IT skills to
deploy, manage and maintain. n
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