Odey heads AU ministers bureau on ICT
Jonah Iboma
2008Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Communications, Mr. John Odey, has emerged the chairperson of the Bureau of African Ministers of Communications and Information Technologies under the auspices of the African Union Commission.
Skip to next paragraph FileMinister of Communications, John Odey
The election of Odey took place at the conference of African Ministers of ICT, which took place during the International Telecommunications Union’s Telecom Africa 2008 conference that ended on Thursday in Cairo, Egypt.
The election is viewed by many as recognition of Nigeria’s influence and current standing in ICT performance in the sub-region.
Odey expressed gratitude to his counterparts across Africa for the confidence reposed in Nigeria to occupy such a position.
He spoke through the Executive Vice Chairman, Nigerian Communications Commission, Mr. Ernest Ndukwe, who represented him at a world press conference at the ITU Africa 2008 event.
Odey, who arrived the event venue later, visited the Nigerian pavilion, where he interacted with officials and representatives of the public and private companies, which took stands at the pavilion.
He also visited the Egyptian pavilion and some other booths belonging to key ICT service providers.
At an earlier press conference, the minister said that Nigeria was one of the most liberalised telecommunications markets on the continent.
According to him, the liberalisation efforts in Nigeria, accentuated by an enabling environment provided by government, and a fair and transparent telecommunications regulatory process, accounted for the appreciable level of telephone penetration with the current teledensity of 32.8per cent.
The minister said Nigeria had, in the last seven years, witnessed one of the fastest rates of growth in the world with 46 million active subscribers as at March, 2008, compared with only 400,000 in 2,000.
He said, “With a population of 140 million people, Nigeria still has very huge capacity to absorb the growth and expansion being currently witnessed in the sector. Having experienced the huge advantages of liberalisation, Nigeria will continue to promote open market policies in the sector to deepen the growth and penetration of telecommunications services.
“The present government in Nigeria is pursuing a programme of collective multi-sector economic growth tagged, ‘Vision 2020,’ designed to position our nation among the league of 20 most robust and vibrant economies of the world by year 2020.
“The role that telecommunications and information technologies are bound to play in realising this dream is not lost on us.”
The minister noted that with 46 million connected lines, there was still a huge market, and that the government was also committed to exploring new telecommunications and information technologies like Internet and broadband access.
He said, “The nation has witnessed a very fast rate of expansion in the mobile services sector. We are now eager to see such fast rate of growth in Internet and broadband connectivity.
“With mobile phone services accounting for 99 per cent telephone availability in Nigeria today, we also envision the possibility that delivery of a faster Internet and broadband services on mobile platform may be a likely growth path for Nigeria.
“We, therefore, want to encourage investments that are focused on these new areas to compliment current performances in the sector.”
He expressed the desire of the government to identify with the Connect Africa Initiative of the ITU, under the leadership Dr. Hammadoun Toure, the Secretary General of the union.
He said Nigeria was proud to have initiated a number of projects that were oriented towards the Connect Africa Initiative such as the Digital Bridge Institute, established to deepen the human capacity availability for ICT in Nigeria, the Wire Nigeria Initiative designed to criss-cross the nation with high capacity optic fibre cable infrastructure as well as the State Accelerated Broadband project, focused on delivering broadband and Internet capabilities to urban and semi-urban and rural locations of the country.
iPartners unveils presence into IT marketJonah Iboma iPartners Limited, a Nigerian technology solutions provider, has said that it would deepen technology solutions provision the Nigerian market. According to the Managing Partner, iPartners Limited, Mr. Damola Olutiola, the firm now has competences that cut across several areas of technology needs such as networking, security of networks, unified communications and managed services. In an interview with our correspondent Olutiola said the firm also had the best team of local expertise of in Cisco certification with four of the company's main workforce already attaining Cisco Certified Internetwork Expertise. Internetwork certification is the highest professional certification offered by Cisco.According to him, this level of expertise is second to none in Nigeria and thus positions iPartners as a market leader in several ways, especially when in network architecture and security. Olutiola added that as a result of the expertise of the firm, iPartners was now silver partner of Cisco Systems, a position that no other firm in the business has surpassed. He said with the level of partnership that it has with Cisco today, he said, Cisco products are what we resell for the most partnersBesides, he stated that the firm had designed some leading solutions in the technology industry namely: i-Secure, i-Build, i-Manage and i-Strategy. He said that i-Secure was designed to meet the security challenges of firms with critical needs to protect their networks against intrusion. He explained that the solution provides scalable and modular security products designed to serve large and diverse set of enterprises that include the most risk-averse organizations in the world. According to Olutiola, "With more companies realising an increasing need to invest in security of their networks, i-Secure product offerings will ensure that your IT network stays multiple steps ahead of hackers, viruses and other threats to your company's most important asset - its corporate data." He explained that i-Build ensures that a firm's information technology infrastructure meets current and future needs.Olutiola said with i-Manage, a company's business would be made more productive. He said the solution helps firms to spend less time to do work he said the solution helps firms to managing their Network/Security infrastructure. He said that part of the company's solutions helps to address internet banking needs in the country and that many banks were already using its solutions.
2008Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Communications, Mr. John Odey, has emerged the chairperson of the Bureau of African Ministers of Communications and Information Technologies under the auspices of the African Union Commission.
Skip to next paragraph FileMinister of Communications, John Odey
The election of Odey took place at the conference of African Ministers of ICT, which took place during the International Telecommunications Union’s Telecom Africa 2008 conference that ended on Thursday in Cairo, Egypt.
The election is viewed by many as recognition of Nigeria’s influence and current standing in ICT performance in the sub-region.
Odey expressed gratitude to his counterparts across Africa for the confidence reposed in Nigeria to occupy such a position.
He spoke through the Executive Vice Chairman, Nigerian Communications Commission, Mr. Ernest Ndukwe, who represented him at a world press conference at the ITU Africa 2008 event.
Odey, who arrived the event venue later, visited the Nigerian pavilion, where he interacted with officials and representatives of the public and private companies, which took stands at the pavilion.
He also visited the Egyptian pavilion and some other booths belonging to key ICT service providers.
At an earlier press conference, the minister said that Nigeria was one of the most liberalised telecommunications markets on the continent.
According to him, the liberalisation efforts in Nigeria, accentuated by an enabling environment provided by government, and a fair and transparent telecommunications regulatory process, accounted for the appreciable level of telephone penetration with the current teledensity of 32.8per cent.
The minister said Nigeria had, in the last seven years, witnessed one of the fastest rates of growth in the world with 46 million active subscribers as at March, 2008, compared with only 400,000 in 2,000.
He said, “With a population of 140 million people, Nigeria still has very huge capacity to absorb the growth and expansion being currently witnessed in the sector. Having experienced the huge advantages of liberalisation, Nigeria will continue to promote open market policies in the sector to deepen the growth and penetration of telecommunications services.
“The present government in Nigeria is pursuing a programme of collective multi-sector economic growth tagged, ‘Vision 2020,’ designed to position our nation among the league of 20 most robust and vibrant economies of the world by year 2020.
“The role that telecommunications and information technologies are bound to play in realising this dream is not lost on us.”
The minister noted that with 46 million connected lines, there was still a huge market, and that the government was also committed to exploring new telecommunications and information technologies like Internet and broadband access.
He said, “The nation has witnessed a very fast rate of expansion in the mobile services sector. We are now eager to see such fast rate of growth in Internet and broadband connectivity.
“With mobile phone services accounting for 99 per cent telephone availability in Nigeria today, we also envision the possibility that delivery of a faster Internet and broadband services on mobile platform may be a likely growth path for Nigeria.
“We, therefore, want to encourage investments that are focused on these new areas to compliment current performances in the sector.”
He expressed the desire of the government to identify with the Connect Africa Initiative of the ITU, under the leadership Dr. Hammadoun Toure, the Secretary General of the union.
He said Nigeria was proud to have initiated a number of projects that were oriented towards the Connect Africa Initiative such as the Digital Bridge Institute, established to deepen the human capacity availability for ICT in Nigeria, the Wire Nigeria Initiative designed to criss-cross the nation with high capacity optic fibre cable infrastructure as well as the State Accelerated Broadband project, focused on delivering broadband and Internet capabilities to urban and semi-urban and rural locations of the country.
iPartners unveils presence into IT marketJonah Iboma iPartners Limited, a Nigerian technology solutions provider, has said that it would deepen technology solutions provision the Nigerian market. According to the Managing Partner, iPartners Limited, Mr. Damola Olutiola, the firm now has competences that cut across several areas of technology needs such as networking, security of networks, unified communications and managed services. In an interview with our correspondent Olutiola said the firm also had the best team of local expertise of in Cisco certification with four of the company's main workforce already attaining Cisco Certified Internetwork Expertise. Internetwork certification is the highest professional certification offered by Cisco.According to him, this level of expertise is second to none in Nigeria and thus positions iPartners as a market leader in several ways, especially when in network architecture and security. Olutiola added that as a result of the expertise of the firm, iPartners was now silver partner of Cisco Systems, a position that no other firm in the business has surpassed. He said with the level of partnership that it has with Cisco today, he said, Cisco products are what we resell for the most partnersBesides, he stated that the firm had designed some leading solutions in the technology industry namely: i-Secure, i-Build, i-Manage and i-Strategy. He said that i-Secure was designed to meet the security challenges of firms with critical needs to protect their networks against intrusion. He explained that the solution provides scalable and modular security products designed to serve large and diverse set of enterprises that include the most risk-averse organizations in the world. According to Olutiola, "With more companies realising an increasing need to invest in security of their networks, i-Secure product offerings will ensure that your IT network stays multiple steps ahead of hackers, viruses and other threats to your company's most important asset - its corporate data." He explained that i-Build ensures that a firm's information technology infrastructure meets current and future needs.Olutiola said with i-Manage, a company's business would be made more productive. He said the solution helps firms to spend less time to do work he said the solution helps firms to managing their Network/Security infrastructure. He said that part of the company's solutions helps to address internet banking needs in the country and that many banks were already using its solutions.
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