Neo Media & Marketing, has tipped Honourable Minister of Communications, Barrister Adebayo Shittu; Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) Professor Umar Danbatta, and the Acting Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Dr. Vincent Olatunji, to lead industry stakeholders to Nigeria Int’l Technology Exhibition & Conference (NITEC 2016) coming up at the Civic Centre, Ozumba Mbadiwe Avenue, Opposite 1004, Victoria Island, Lagos; June 23rd–24th, 2016.
Interestingly, experienced speakers from diverse professions related to technology: experts, strategists, innovators, investors and media will be gracing the occasion, which will essentially benefit service providers.
Why? Like giant killers, today’s world of technology is about disruptions and it has now come to the point where disruptors are now getting disrupted. How do you disrupt or get disrupted? How can African start-ups disrupt telecoms for better? I think NITEC will provide the answer.
A Message To Telcos, ISPs, And Service Vendors
Yea, NITEC 2016 could be likened to Nigeria version of tech Olympics which is positioned to rally most innovative startups together with the major players in digital transformation.
Now, it’s time for the cognoscente, intelligentsia, academics, highbrows, and scholars and seasoned entrepreneurs occupying privileged positions in corporate enclaves to seek alternatives to Nigeria’s technology guzzling and talking irrelevancies, by leaning, piously, on startups with knacks for disruptive technologies.
For instance, Over-The-Top (OTT) services proliferation is already disrupting telecoms market mainly at the expense of Voice and SMS services.
By implication, the Network Service Providers (NSPs) are reaching the tail end of an era of unprecedented profits driven by mobile voice and messaging revenues.
The calculated undercurrents in the market depict a paradigm shift where communications are increasingly data centric – VOIP, M2M messaging, social messaging, file sharing etc.
Ovum just updated its view for the outbound Mobile Roaming market, which is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 1.3% in revenue terms between 2015 and 2020.
But, the anticipated growth will be fuelled by “Data” roaming growth (CAGR 14.8%), not Voice or SMS.
Ovum roaming forecast methodology was revamped due to the fast-changing nature of roaming markets across the globe, to capture new consumer pricing trends, as markets transition away from per-unit pricing to more consumer-friendly tariffs (i.e. roaming bundles). Did you copy that?
Perhaps, many view it as a power struggle between telecom companies, carriers, and service providers on one side and OTT vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Skype, WhatsApp, on the other side for control of these new forms of communication. It will pay companies that refuse to evaluate the trend from such angle, rather rationalize the question– do we keep watching OTT vendors take over the market? Should we be content with providing access services, and continue seeing a downtrend in APRUs; or do we proactively leverage their strategic strength and claim their stake in the OTT market? I have a strong feeling that after disrupting network service providers, startups will up the game in data centres.
Therefore, NITEC 2016 was conceived after looking through the prisms of the market and the emerging trends; and positioned to bridge the gap between the private and public sectors and the international technology community in re-engineering the African technological ecosystem for greater impact on the continent’s GDP.
As NITEC 2016 will be taking place at Civic Centres in Lagos on from June 23rd to 24th, every stakeholder should back Barrister Shittu, Professor Danbatta and Dr. Olatunji to further deepen the conversation and help new innovations grow have become imperative.
It is wise enough to thrown our weight behind these men who have demonstrated willingness to redefine the Nigeria’s information and communication technology industry teetotalism for good.
Through NITEC 2016, our startups can be assured and reassured of purpose-built environment, serving as a real-time platform for collaboration and a high-level stage for discussions around the impact technology has on both multinationals, medium and small businesses and the society at large.
It behooves on the telecos, ISPs, and other service vendors, to cease the show and get the best from disruptive tech startup, because gainful technological disruption occurs when entrepreneurs, corporate executives, venture capitalists and other investors point at same direction.
