If Africa plays its virtual cards right and refocuses, it will soon be in a position to not only capitalise on increased foreign interest from multinationals, but also sustain and leverage its own local technology evolution to create a business revolution and export the spinoffs.

This is according to Mpumi Nhlapo, Head of Demand and Marketing, IT Portfolio & Solution Sales at T-Systems.

He refers to the continent's ability to overcome fixed line challenges and leverage the mobile revolution to safeguard the proliferation of mobile and disrupt traditional technology. "Now that we have this massive mobile infrastructure, therein lies a huge opportunity for us to build the next version of a digital economy."

Nhlapo believes projected statistics favour the continent and its ability to take advantage of growth opportunities and effectively benefiting from what he calls a 'balance of payment effect'.

He says by 2025, Africa will have a population of roughly 1.49 billion, with the youngest population globally, and close to 4 billion connected devices. "Currently only 2% of Africa's GDP is internet-related economies, by 2025 it will be more than three times that, about 7% of the economy, about US$400 billion will be internet economies and the interesting part (of that) is about 4% of that will be based on our exports of digital economy related activities."

Africa – the next biggest opportunity

While Africa is entering a period of retrospection in terms of its digital transformation and identifying related opportunities, Nhlapo says that international tech heavyweights like Google and Facebook are taking the opportunity within Africa very seriously.

"Google started off as a search engine and Facebook was a social networking platform, but they've realised the African emerging market opportunity... so they want to farm and harvest our data, because they know the next biggest opportunity for their customers...so for their fast-moving consumer goods companies, for their fashion and lifestyle companies, so all these companies that want to sell goods in Africa, their biggest opportunities is into the emerging markets. How are they going to do that? through advertising and through marketing on social media and all these other platforms."

His observation is that these global multinationals have definitely recognised the opportunity and are ready with huge sums of money ready to invest in innovation to capitalise on what they are treating as commodity – something that is ubiquitous and freely available.

"Why would they go and invest such a lot of money to provide free internet... it's not about the connectivity, cause we are caught up on providing the connectivity itself, on infrastructure and Fibre to the Home – which is important, don't get me wrong, but what I am saying is these guys are treating it like commodity. They are going to put drones and balloons in the sky and this stuff will be ubiquitous and they will provide it for free," says Nhlapo.

Core system renovation

Gartner Vice President and analyst David Willis says the issue is not whether or not to transform. He says businesses recognise the need for a major digital overhaul that requires new interfaces for users and more intelligent decision making – as well as the use of advanced technologies like PAs (personal assistants) and artificial intelligence, chatbots and the like in order to create new experiences for users.

"But meanwhile typically well over 70% of the budget is spent on feeding the existing legacy systems, and that is the challenge... how do we strip out what doesn't differentiate the organisation anymore, and as much as possible move that out to the cloud," said Willis.

Many businesses in Africa are eager to invest in technology systems and integrate these, but sit with the issue of how to deal with the challenge of technical debt.

"There is a legacy system problem, just large systems that are redundant and then there are those things which are highly customised over time and therefore very difficult to modernise," Willis adds.

He believes that the focus going forward should be to renovate core systems and "getting down to what is really foundational" and holding on to what differentiates the business. "If it doesn't differentiate you and it's not something that's a competitive advantage, then either consolidating it or pushing it out to the cloud, or maybe both."