Business leaders and ICT experts from across Africa will convene on 27 July for the Huawei Cloud Summit Africa 2020, an online event to unpack the opportunities of cloud computing for African business and how cloud will transform industries during the fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).

The event will feature a dozen industry leaders addressing the theme, “Building an intelligent Africa”. It will investigate how cloud will fundamentally revolutionise sectors such as finance, energy, manufacturing, mining and others. The Huawei Cloud offering will be a central part of this transformation, driving rapid industry progress with local partners.

Register here now for this free summit

“We look forward to mapping Africa’s cloud-enabled future with leading players across critical sectors,” said Ray Rui, president of Huawei Cloud, Africa region. “The summit will feature innovators and Huawei partners in the AI, fintech, SME and e-commerce arenas, and offer great insights into how cloud will enable progress and rapid tech evolution.”

The Huawei Cloud Summit Africa 2020 online event on 27 July will feature 12 speakers in a compact two-hour programme. Speakers will include:

Kabelo Makwane, managing executive of cloud, hosting and security at Vodacom Business;
Bosco Ho, regional sales development manager, Intel;
Jannie Engelbrecht, cloud business unit manager at Pinnacle;
Ray Rui, president of Huawei Cloud, Africa region; and
Michael Langeveld, vice president of Huawei Cloud, Africa region.

The 4IR transformation will be characterised by massive, large-scale communication via the Internet of things, with cloud as the foundation of these mass communication capabilities.

Africa still has great potential in terms of cloud, and is showing significant progress, with data-centre capacity doubling in the past three years. However, Africa’s cloud capacity still accounts for less than 1% of global availability.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown have driven up data demand as remote work and e-commerce become the norm. In this context, cloud computing, with its instant availability of IT resources, has also been a fundamental support system for African organisations.

Globally, many enterprises have adopted cloud-first strategies, and the trend is likely to find broad application in Africa, too.

The Huawei Cloud Summit Africa 2020 takes place on Monday, 27 July from 10am to 12pm. Attendees can register for the free summit here.