There is a new crop of developers that exploit the Internet of Things (IoT) and push the software ecosystem to the next level - they are data developers.

Paolo Campoli, Senior Director Global SP Sales, CTO at Cisco said that these developers have the potential to come up with great innovations for Africa because they will programme on top of the network and open up new avenues of ideas.

"These are people who understand the nature of the cloud, devices and the networks and can create applications that programme directly to them," Campoli explained.

"We believe in the African environment... that is a unique opportunity to basically train people who will create a new ecosystem of data developers," he said at the AfricaCom conference hosted this week in Cape Town.

This new generation of developers are expected to reinforce the Internet of Things/Internet of Everything as data from networks increases in volume and is utilised in industry.

Africa is poised to benefit from IoT due to the many challenges that can be solved through the digitisation of several sectors including agriculture, healthcare and education.

Cisco has already started a community to support this initiative under the arm DevNet. DevNet currently has 300,000 members from around the globe.

Campoli said that the company would be investing more into Africa to develop the skills required for IoT. "One of our agendas is enhancing skill sets, educating users to become digital citizens in the internet of things," he said.

He added that the second agenda is to create a community of developers who will add value to the various platforms in IoT.