Andy Brauer is now at Huawei Technologies, determined to entrench the Chinese ICT solutions provider's value further into the market.

As of January 2016 Brauer takes up the position of CTO at Huawei, responsible for the entire Group's Eastern and Southern Africa operations. In an exclusive interview with ITWeb Africa, the company says the move signals its strength in the market and determination to compete in key segments.

Brauer intends to enforce a 90-day strategy to improve and accelerate Huawei as a premium brand, specifically to highlight aspects such as sustained innovation, good service and quality.

Challenges remain

Regarding pressing issues facing Africa in terms of ICT, Brauer says, "We can talk about security and skills and many other issues, but we need to get the basics right. Electricity outage is a big issue as without electricity even to charge your phone, there is no communications and no cloud... people tend to forget out power outage planning until it is too late. Having a business which is online needs an off-line mode, which many retail companies have learnt, but this extends to any service-based company."

Another big issue is being able to ensure service delivery is at a level where the user experience is, at the very least, acceptable.

However, there are other aspects of operation and technology that is affecting businesses operating in Africa.

Digitisation will fuel demand for automation and disrupt manual processes, which will require the reskilling of the manual labour force, according to Brauer.

Security is another area of growing concern to all businesses. "It is really about being streetwise and those targeted are often naïve or old," he says.

But are companies doing all they should to protect their assets? Brauer says backups in any company are important and there is legislation which governs record keeping. "What I think companies do not do, and this is really important, is to test backups regularly for recovery of data."

Brauer uses the local job market as a gauge to see what is emerging as key trends and he lists SMAC, social media, mobility, analytics and cloud as common themes. While Internet of Everything could be added to the list, and enhance the importance of skilled programmers as the hunt for algorithms for analytics rises. "As companies also start to break down silos, the rise of the API will continue as companies try to gain competitive advantage and look for efficiencies," he says.

Brauer has over 38 years of ICT experience in research, and introducing new technologies. He has specialised in business and technology strategy across various fields including networking telecommunications, system management, software development and service-orientated architecture and cloud computing.