WE BELIEVE THAT THERE ARE TOP SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS IN RIVERS STATE – Sprinthub CEO

WE BELIEVE THAT THERE ARE TOP SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS IN RIVERS STATE – Sprinthub CEO

WE BELIEVE THAT THERE ARE TOP SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS IN RIVERS STATE – Sprinthub CEO

In this interview, the CEO of Sprinthub, Sokari Gillis-Harry, the CEO of Sprint Innovation Hub State speaks on how post Covid 19 will be a game changer in the ICT ecosystem, as a software development firm based in Rivers State, known for oil and gas activities, the software developer made people to understand that there are more to Rivers State than oil and gas industry. Anthony Nwosu captures this in an exclusive interview

Sprinthub is an IT establishment, can we know when you started?

We started in July 2018. The name Sprinthub comes from our agile approach. We break down an idea down to its most valuable and essential components. By helping you focus on what really matters, we create a solid foundation for sustainable business success. The end result: a product worth feeling passionate about. To us, engineering mobile app experiences is beyond a job. It’s our way of connecting ambitious entrepreneurs (and businesses) with customers in today’s mobilized world. Though, the journey hasn’t been an easy one, we consider ourselves as start-up but we have a positive outlook to the ecosystem.

Why Rivers State? Many IT and software development firms are based in Lagos, Yaba precisely, why Port Harcourt?

As a service-based company that builds digital products, the need for our customers to meet physically with us is not necessary, if we do exceptional work and deliver on time. We have clients in Europe that will never meet us even if we move to Lagos. In the early days we had difficulties finding talents because the best talents are moving to Lagos, but we quickly adjusted to a Remote DevOps culture which enabled us to find talents across the Globe. At the moment our Quality Assurance Testers are in Europe. So as an IT firm, we have to leverage on technology in the areas of capacity building and skills outsourcing. We mustn’t be in Lagos as you said to scale.

Over the years you have developed many software solutions, how is the capacity building and skillset there, in a city known for oil exploration?     

It’s amazing the kind of talents that are down here if you pay enough attention. After we started working with remote employees, we found that there are senior software engineers and designers in Port Harcourt and we couldn’t find IT firms that can match their salary. They gave up and applied for remote positions oversees. We were able to get some of them into advisory positions in the company. So, the city isn’t all about oil and energy services, the ICT ecosystem is also busy and burgeoning.

Bhood Music is one of your music and online entertaining app, what have you achieved with this. A lot of online streaming apps have been accused of short changing the artistes in terms of revenue. What is different about this?

The Bhood Music team approached us to build a platform that will be is strictly for religious acapela music. We currently don’t know how much they pay their artists but their userbase have been growing and they have plans to expand to other religious organizations. Ours is to develop a bespoke software and solutions for organizations and Bhood Music happens to be one of them.

How many downloads and streaming do you have averagely in a month?

The last time we looked at their dashboard, they had over 1000 downloads per day. We strongly believe that this number would increase, knowing that gospel and accapella type of music is restricted to certain class of audience, it is a niche market and for that application to witness about 1000 downloads per day is a step in the right direction.

Do we have your solutions (software and apps) in other West African Countries?          

Currently we don’t. We are working on one that will be available for public beta testing by the end of Q3 2020. We have our eyes in the overseas markets especially the ECOWAS region. We strongly believe that we would be deploying there in no distant future.

Cabby Nigeria is an app designed to give Uber a run for their money. How has this been considering the level of signups and download in Rivers State and Niger Delta region?

Even though I am not allowed to comment on the internal business affairs of our customers, I will say the business of competing against heavily funded companies like Uber is tough, though I see them becoming a major player in Nigeria in the coming years. We strongly believe in their capacity, the market in Nigeria is huge.

What are the challenges that you face doing business in Rivers State and Nigeria as a nation?         

Electricity, Stable internet and security are the major challenges we have. We have a lot to contend with in these afore mentioned areas. They have eaten deep in our operational expenditure. Internet connectivity is still on the high side in this part of the world especially high-speed internet. These are the teething problems we face, the issue of security is another thing, but we believe that the state and the federal government is doing something in these regards.

The country is emerging from Corona Virus epidemic, what are the unique solutions that you have that you think that would interest Nigerians?

On-demand delivery solutions will become mainstream as we come out of the pandemic. Before, adoption to services like this were difficult but the lockdown left people with no choice but to give these services a try. So as you can see,  the social distancing policy by the government will spur growth in this area and we as a software development firm is well positioned to take advantage of this by creating top notch on demand solutions that is in tandem with what is applicable in other parts of globe.

As a stakeholder in the industry, do you think that the government is doing anything or much to support indigenous IT firs like yours in terms of policy?

They are doing okay, but there is room for improvement. The recent open bank policy has enabled new fintech businesses with little or no external funding to build solutions that are disrupting the banking sector. There would be a whole lot of disruption from FinTechs to eLearning solutions, what the government must do is to create an enabling environment for these. Yes, NITDA has put machinery in motion and we believe that the minister Isa Pantami the ComTech Minister understands what to do in these regards.

Do you think that Nigerians are beginning to appreciate locally developed software?

Yes, we have customers that would have hired Indian firms if they did not find us. So we can say yes to your question, but we are not yet there, we are not going to build software so that Nigerians will buy from us or we deploy for them, we believe here that they will buy from us as a Nigerian firm and more importantly, because we built a world class solutions for them. 

The recent open bank policy has enabled new fintech businesses with little or no external funding to build solutions that are disrupting the banking sector. There would be a whole lot of disruption from FinTechs to eLearning solutions, what the government must do is to create an enabling environment for these.

NETCOM AFRICA ANNOUNCES ITS PARTNERSHIPS WITH THE TOP GLOBAL PROVIDERS IN IT SECURITY

NETCOM AFRICA ANNOUNCES ITS PARTNERSHIPS WITH THE TOP GLOBAL PROVIDERS IN IT SECURITY

In today’s changing business environment, the need to have a robust virtual security architecture has become imperative. Having this in mind, Netcom Africa, Nigeria’s foremost managed IT service provider and outsourcing firm has brought to the fore a bouquet of information technology ( IT ) security solutions for businesses in Nigeria. 

With the high rising incidents of breaches in various organizations today, investing in IT security becomes more imperative in order to secure critical assets and information. According to reports, over N127 Billion losses annually as a result of security breaches in the country, and $2.1 Trillion USD worldwide. Over 60% of small and medium sized busineses that suffer a cyber security breach will go out of business within 6 months of the breach due to reputation damage, customer and financial loss, and legal actions. Netcom Africa has introduced top-notch security solutions that would address the issue of breaches. Over the years, Netcom has solidified its footprint in Nigeria’s tech market with the deployment of robust cyber security services targeting Nigerian corporate where high-end tech services are steadily on the rise.

“Security is best when it’s silent, our solutions feature both cloud and on-premise SSO, multi-factor authentication, user provisioning with self-service and access governance, password synchronization, self-service password reset and even AD & NTFS auditing tools”, Harrington Charles, Vice President, Corporate Development & Marketing, Netcom Africa.

Organizations are to enjoy the latest deployments in the cyber security system. According to Netcom Africa, the company opined that their security information and event management (SIEM) service collects and analyses security information in real time from across your organization. A combination of powerful proprietary technologies and human intelligence helps to prevent attacks on your network, and protect your commercially sensitive information.

One of the best preventative measures that any organization can undertake is education of its people. Providing cybersecurity training for your employees is by far the best value for cost and too many users don’t know the basic practices such as updating software, recognizing a phishing email, and use of strong passwords.

Netcom Africa have designed these types of trainings as well as partnered with global reputable brands to bring Nigerians the best cyber security solutions available in any part of the world.

“We’ve partnered with Shelt, the European Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP), to offer the first cloud-based cybersecurity platform in Nigeria, FirstWave Cloud Content Security Platform (CCSP). The Email Security, Web Security, and Firewall Security suite is based on the most robust enterprise solutions of Cisco, Palo Alto and Fortinet and does away with the need to have an on premise appliance. The suite is available on per user model and can be easily scaled for any size business and gives small and medium sized companies access to high end solutions that would normally be suited for Fortune 500 companies with 1000+ users. In addition, we also have partnerships with Microsoft, Kaspersky, Tata Communications, and Sophos, the global leaders in Cynbersecurity including Endpoint protection, Firewall, DDoS Detection and Mitigation, UTM (Unified Threat Management), and Penetration testing, to complete our suite of security solutions allowing us to give your company the right balance between value and cost to meet your objectives,” Charles Concluded.

NCC Explains Reasons for Revising Complaints Categories, Service Level Agreements

NCC Explains Reasons for Revising Complaints Categories, Service Level Agreements

… Says revision to strengthen consumer protection

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) said it undertook a revision of the framework stipulating the processes for resolving consumer complaints arising from service delivery by telecoms operator in order to achieve greater effectiveness in the sector and to strengthen the protection of telecoms consumers and other stakeholders.

Tagged: Complaints Categories and Service Level Agreements (CC/SLA), the framework was revised by the Commission in November 2019 at a programme attended by representatives of telecoms operators, consumers and other consumer rights advocacy groups in the country.

“The 2019 review of the CC/SLA, in collaboration with operators and other stakeholders, was essentially to strengthen effective and prompt resolutions of consumers complaints by reviewing the timelines, broaden and streamline complaint categories and establishing applicable sanctions on operators that fail to meet the timelines stated for resolving issues related to services delivery to their consumers,” the Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of NCC, Prof. Umar Danbatta, said.

In the reviewed CC/SLA, with respect to the broad category of Quality of Service and Quality of Experience (QoS and QoE) in the data segment, when a telecom subscriber experiences fluctuation in service, such as instability in the Internet services, the subscriber shall be contacted by the service provider within four hours of reporting the incident and the disruption shall be restored within 72 hours.

If the matter is escalated to the Commission, the consumer is expected to receive feedback within two hours, while the Commission ensures the issue is resolved within 48 hours. Additionally, the subscriber shall be offered an apology and the expiry date of his data bundle shall be extended by the number of days the disruption lasted.

Under the broad category, ‘Billing’, complaints connected to any unexplained change in account balance resulting in a drop in balance, due to overcharging subscriber’s account for calls, Short Messaging Services (SMS) and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), shall be resolved by the operator within 24 hours. Should there be a need by the subscriber to escalate the complaint to NCC, the Commission shall ensure the matter is resolved within 12 hours. The subscriber shall be notified of resolution and where applicable, compensated with five percent of overcharged amount which is payable daily to the consumer for every 24hrs of default.

Similarly, within the framework of QoS/QoE in the voice segment, the revised agreement stipulates that, when there is call interference or challenge with voice clarity, resulting in the inability of a subscriber to carry out uninterrupted conversation, the subscriber shall receive response from the service provider within four hours of reporting the incident and the service provider shall ensure the challenge is resolved within 72 hours. Should there be a basis for the subscriber to escalate the matter to NCC, the Commission shall revert to the subscriber within two hours of receiving the report and ensure that the matter is resolved within 48 hours in line with the Quality of Service (QoS) Regulations and the subscriber shall be communicated.

Also, under the new CC/SLAs that have now come into force, in the case of Sales Promotion and Advertisement, when a subscriber does not receive (within stipulated time) bonus or incentives won during promotions, the service provider shall resolve the matter within 12 hours of receiving the complaints, instead of 24 hours as stipulated in the hitherto existing categorisation and agreement. Should the matter be escalated to NCC, Commission shall ensure it is resolved within six hours in line with the Guidelines on Advertisement and Promotions. As in all cases, the subscriber shall be communicated on steps taken towards resolution of complaints.

Similarly, in the expansive category of Call Centre/Customer Care, the NCC agreed with stakeholders that when a subscriber is unable to connect to Call Center or Service Provider Help Line, the matter shall be treated by the Service Provider within four hours of receiving the report. Where the matter is escalated to the Commission, NCC shall ensure that the issue is resolved within two hours of receiving the complaints, and steps taken towards resolution shall be communicated to the subscriber in all circumstances.

On matters connected to faulty terminals, such as defective devices that stifle a subscriber’s ability to use phones, modems, routers and related devices appropriately, the Commission said such incidents shall be resolved based on Terms and Conditions for all devices.

Meanwhile, Danbatta equally stated that matters relating to Base Transceiver Stations (BTS), such as problems arising from installation and location of base stations, masts or towers, shall be resolved by the concerned operator(s) within the 48 hours, as stated in the revised CC/SLA. In case the Commission is notified by the affected consumer, the matter shall be referred, immediately to Commission’s Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement Department, which shall ensure resolution of the matter within 48 hours and inform the complainant accordingly.

The EVC added that the CC/SLA document, which is available on the Commission’s website, contains 17 broad categories and about 90 subcategories. He enjoined all stakeholders, particularly the telecom consumers, to create the time to study the document in order to understand their rights and privileges.

Dr. Ikechukwu Adinde
Director, Public Affairs

FPG Technologies & Solutions holds DX Roundtable Tagged: Applied Digital Transformation – Achieving The Digital Enterprise

FPG Technologies & Solutions holds DX Roundtable Tagged: Applied Digital Transformation – Achieving The Digital Enterprise

FPG Technologies & Solutions Limited with its technology solution partners Nutanix, Pcysys, Blackberry and  Digalance,  recently hosted business and IT executives from different sectors across Nigeria in an event, aimed at showcasing a macro view of Digital Transformation objectives and iterate how businesses can harness innovative digital technologies in Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Cyber Resilience and Data Analytics to enable organizations to make evidence-based business decisions and enhance the customer experience. In attendance were representatives from Banking/financials, Oil and Gas, Telcos and Manufacturing sectors respectively.

In his keynote address, Rex Mafiana CEO of FPG Technologies & Solutions Limited reiterated FPG’s commitment to customer success. “FPG is primarily focused on extreme business agility and confidence.  We are committed to empowering organizations to help shape and execute their Digital Transformation strategy efficiently through addressing the challenges and benefits associated with driving Digital Transformation for the bottom line.   Digital Transformation is about agility, culture change, cross-functional teams that work efficiently and effectively together. According to him, Customer /User Experience is at the heart of digital transformation of any organization, the new culture today is that organization can make changes in their digital and IT infrastructure without disrupting their normal businesses as it currently happens in Nigeria”.

‘’At Digalance, we use a well-defined governance framework that helps organizations define and implement a digital transformation DevOps strategy which ensures business platforms and pipelines are built on a solid foundation of repeatability, testability and scalability. The governance framework covers; people, process, tools and takes cognizance of the important culture change aspects.  Digalance unlocks the power of the cloud by delivering IT modernization and helping organizations adopt digital transformation DevOps at scale’’. Willem Coetsee, Sales Director, Digalance.

Also speaking at the event on Automated Penetration Testing, Noam Segev, Distinguished Cybersecurity Consultant and Regional Director Iberia, Southeast Europe, CIS and Africa, Pcysys added: “organizations such as financial firms must always be one step ahead in having their critical assets secured.  With approaches such as vulnerability scanning, validation, mediation and penetration tasting used to checkmate breaches taking longer and longer times, coupled with the scarcity of the right skills and human limitations, we have deployed a robotic artificial intelligent solution that mimics thousands of people testing your platform for vulnerability and continuously validating your security controls and processes.  We believe that with this solution in place, organizations will reduce their operational expenditure on pen-testing.

“In these recent times when Businesses are pressured to Innovate and are more cost constrained than ever, our priority at Nutanix is to ensure Enterprises across Africa are able to deliver Computing Infrastructure Simply, efficiently and at unprecedentedly low costs through our Scale Out Architecture’’  Babatunde Abagun | Channel Manager WECA, Nutanix iterated.

Toheeb Mohammed, Sales Manager at FPG speaking at the event on Blackberry Enterprise Mobility Suite asserted, “BlackBerry is an enterprise software and services company focused on securing and managing endpoints. As a leading UEM provider, BlackBerry provides organizations with software to secure their mobile and IoT devices, products, data and communication. Our technology partners are carefully selected to match our drive to provide best in class technology solutions, bringing flexibility and agility to Nigerian businesses’’.

About FPG Technologies & Solutions Limited

FPG Technologies and Solutions Limited (a member of FlexiP Group) is an IT Systems Integrator. FPG’s vision is to provide innovative and secure IT solutions that help customers drive extreme business agility with confidence.

FPG Technologies Wins Awards In Ghana

FPG Technologies Wins Awards In Ghana

FPG Technologies and Solutions Limited, a member of FlexiP Group, has announced that it recently received three awards from the 2019 Nigeria Technology Awards (NiTA).

NiTA is an annual event organised to celebrate and reward technology entrepreneurs, technology professionals, corporate organisations, innovators, academicians, inventors and policy makers in Nigeria. The annual award recognises outstanding technology companies and individuals in Nigeria who have made contributions during the past year, as well as to the technology industry overall.

FPG Technologies and Solutions Limited won in three categories: Tech Consulting Company of the Year 2019, Excellence in Cloud and Infrastructure Deployment 2019. Also, FPG’s CEO Rex Mafiana won Most Enterprising Tech Company CEO of The Year.

The NiTA awards serves to reiterate FPG’S commitment for deploying innovative IT technology, developing strong partnerships with OEM’s, impacting business results through a consumer-centric focus and embracing technology as a mission-critical business enabler.

FPG’s CEO, Rex Mafiana, is a technology advocate and recognised for his outstanding leadership in accelerating IT adoption in Nigeria.

“I am humbled by this award and remain grateful to the organizers and our customers who keep trusting us to partner with them in their endeavours and journey towards building true digital enterprises that ensure agility with confidence. We see significant and growing adoption rates for all things cloud and Cyber Security, these are areas we have key strengths and will continue to support our customers,” Mafiana said.