Kenyan industries are more aware of cloud infrastructure and products, and the adoption of cloud solutions is on the increase compared to previous years.

Serge Blockmans, Sales Director at Oracle said that telecommunications, finance institutions and public bodies are the top industries adopting cloud solutions.

“We see a growing demand for cloud solutions from IaaS, SaaS and the applications themselves. The cause of the upsurge is customers in Kenya are keen to reduce their IT related expenditure,” Blockmans said.

Local customers are following the international trend to avoid having to maintain their own servers and IT infrastructure, which would otherwise negatively impact the bottom line.

Blockmans added that data security concerns are driving companies to outsource reputable companies to handle data and this in turn is fuelling cloud adoption.

“Industries globally are undergoing major changes in their business model and cloud solutions and particularly cloud applications give companies agility to react to those transformations,” Blockmans said.

“In Kenya we are particularly good with regards to network infrastructure that is a major enabler for the uptake of cloud solutions.”

Blockmans did add that in this region, enterprise resource planning solutions are not seeing as greater uptake as customer experience.

“It is a fact that ERP is lagging compared to customer experience for the reason that those (ERP) processes are complex. The growth of social media has made companies take note of customer sentiments and this has led to the uptake of customer experience applications,” he explained.

Oracle recently launched Cloud at Customer product that will enable organisations access cloud applications directly from their data centres.

“We give clients who have - for different reasons - questions around data residency, a solution that makes the availability of a server in their data centre as part of our cloud solution,” he said.

Kenya is among countries that do not have legislation on data residency, but is mulling over how to handle public data.
Customers will have access to Oracle SaaS services such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Human Capital Management, Customer Relationship Management, and Supply Chain Management in their own datacentres.