Huawei has launched Africa’s Cloud and Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre

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The Huawei Cloud Summit Africa 2020 went down so well yesterday, Monday, July 27. The virtual event which brought together business leaders and ICT experts from across Africa started at 10 AM and ended at 12 noon. The summit saw the 12 featured speakers discuss different ways to unpack the opportunities of cloud computing for African businesses during the two-hour program which was also live-streamed via Huawei Cloud’s social media pages and website.

Themed ‘Building an intelligent Africa’, the event speakers led by Huawei Cloud’s President for Africa Region, Ray Rui analyzed the future of Africa Cloud Computing and how it will transform industries during the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). During the summit, Mr. Ray Rui announced the launch of a South Africa-based Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Innovation Centre meant to drive innovation, knowledge transfer, and economic growth through app development in the AI industry.

“AI will be critical to social evolution and industrial growth in the future. We also believe that when you grow economic opportunities, everyone benefits. For this reason, we are opening the Huawei Cloud&AI Innovation Centre to application developers across all economic sectors,” announced Mr. Ray Rui.

The center will be based at Huawei’s South African headquarters in Woodmead, Johannesburg, but developers across Africa will be able to access the center remotely. It will be a platform to teach AI application best practices to the African developers, link them to markets, support AI supply chains, develop talents, and support application innovations in the region.

Other speakers included Langeveld Michael, Marcus Tay Soon Guan and George Thabit Ayad Thomas, Vice President,  Chief Tech Director, and Senior Solutions Manager  Huawei Cloud Africa Region, respectively. Eddie Ndichu – CEO & Founder of WapiPay, Peter Githura – KiliShop Operations Supervisor at Kilimall, Pedro Lopes – Group Managing Director of Seidor Africa, Terrence Chowles – Director of Seidor Networks, Prudence Mabistela – Co-founder Managing Director at Dynamic DNA, Yamkela F Spengane – CEO & Founder of SapioTek, Jannie Engelbrecht – Cloud Business Unit Manager of Pinnacle, Kabelo Makwane – Vodacom Business Managing Executive of Cloud, Hosting and Security, and Bosco Ho – Regional Sales Development Manager, Intel Corporation.

“Our Huawei Cloud partnership has enabled us to offer simple, fast, secure payment solutions for clients in Africa and Asia, it’s a modular, end-to-end solution that positions us perfectly for future growth into new services and new markets,” said Kenya’s Eddie Ndichu, CEO and founder of the WapiPay payment platform.

IT has played a key role in Africa’s productivity efficiency by automating innumerable business processes, such as accounting, human resources, and customer relationship management (CRM) for industries such as investment, banking, farming, manufacturing and small-medium enterprises (SMEs), which make up a high percentage of the continent’s employment. With the rapid adoption of cloud computing, Africa’s organizations, institutions, and companies will no longer need to invest heavily in resources that require burdensome and costly internal management and will particularly play a key role in the revival of businesses, Post-COVID.  

Read Also: Huawei Deputy Chairman Lauds Success of DigiTruck in Providing Digital Skills in Kenya; Announces Expansion to Five Additional Countries

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