XON hosts third annual summit XON, the pan-African ICT group, hosted its two-day, invitation-only annual summit at Sun City last week.
Among attendees were delegates from Seacom, South Africa’s State Information Technology Agency (SITA), Telecom Namibia, Internet Solutions, VOX Telecom, Standard Bank, Vodacom, TN Mobile, SSA, Somtel, SARS, SAPS, NPA, Neotel, the Namibian government, Metrofibre Networx, the Department of Education, Ithala Bank, FNB, BT, the CSIR, Wananchi, Somtel, Department of Defence, Baharicom, Limpopo provincial government, Teraco Data Environments, MTN and many more.
“The summit intends to give telecoms operators, enterprises and government organisations from across Africa the opportunity to learn the latest trends and issues in ICT from the some of the industry’s top vendors, users and specialists,” says Charl Coetzee, MD of XON. “This is our third annual ICT summit and the level of interaction between delegates has been overwhelming.”
The summit, themed Innovative Treasures through Partnerships, saw almost 400 select delegates attend. It was established to be a deal-making opportunity where customers can source the technologically-advanced solutions they need to compete across Africa and on the global stage with respect to telecoms, networking, security, infrastructure, sustainability, storage and retail.
Vendors present at the event included premium sponsor, Juniper Networks, which celebrated 10 years working with XON. The two partners have collaborated on many projects, most recently to establish a unified backhaul network for Telecom Namibia and deployment of an IP/MPLS network at Seacom. Platinum sponsors included Schneider Electric, ADVA Optical Networking, Citrix and ChannelCapital. Gold sponsors included NEC, Symantec, PeerApp and Procera. Silver sponsors included Sonus, EMC, Skybox Security, Aruba, Delta and HP.
Premium sponsor Juniper Networks’ Adrian Pickering, VP, Middle East Africa, discussed the power of a connected world in the opening session. Bruce Grobler, southern Africa IT business director at Schneider Electric, informed delegates about managing business innovation and IT excellence.
Christoph Glingener, chief technology officer at ADVA Optical Networking, enlightened attendees on his topic: towards programmable connectivity of tomorrow, while Jason Poole, senior field readiness manager, EMEA, at Citrix, discussed architecting for the future – delivering business-critical applications in this modern age of on-demand IT.
Seacom’s Mark Tinka was among the key speakers, who highlighted how dual vendor suppliers can infuse the strength of technology diversity in networks and how XON helped the organisation to realise its goal of becoming an IP service provider.
Thereafter followed four breakaway sessions with David Noguer Bau, SP marketing, EMEA at Juniper Networks revealing insights into SDN and NFV for high IQ networks, George Senzere, solution engineering manager at Schneider Electric, discussing sustainable and efficient data centre cooling infrastructure, Eugene Le Roux, MD of NEC Africa, discussing the new last mile, and Werner van der Walt, solutions engineer at Procera Networks, who talked about improving the subscriber experience.
A further four breakaway sessions followed with Clinton Greeff, sales specialist networking (Africa) at Citrix, talking about enabling agility on your networking and application tiers – staying ahead of the demand; Rainer Brandl, senior systems consultant at ADVA Optical Networking, who talked about hijacking on the data highway – protection against a real threat; Grant Brown, security strategist at Symantec, discussed wearable technology – evolution and security; and Charl Crofton, head of sales engineering Africa at PeerApp, spoke about what is needed to generate revenue and deliver quality of experience.
The last presentation of the day was by David Naudé, commercial manager SA at Juniper Networks, who discussed: the threat keeps growing, are we doing it wrong?
“The summit is coming of age now,” says Coetzee, “because our delegates have capitalised on the opportunity to take their own organisations forward by bringing the partners on board that can give them the expertise and functionality they need to realise their business goals.”
