After all the excitement and buzz leading to this year’s conference, NigeriaCom 2013 finally started with registration of the delegates and members of the press. The event kicked off proper with the keynote address by the CEO of Etisalat, the headline sponsor of this year event. It is worth pointing out that the exhibition booths opened early. So, people had enough time to interact and share information before most settled down for the day’s event.
The panel sessions and the individual presentations lived up to the pre-event hypes and expectations. One of the panel sessions focused on the “quality of service on the network, challenges and opportunities for telecoms operators in Nigeria”. The members of the panel included a representative of the NCC, Awadesh Kalia (CTO, Airtel Nigeria), Rajiv Jaitly (CEO, HIS Africa) and a senior representative from Etisalat. The key submission from this panel discussion was that there is definitely room for improvement when it comes to quality of services being delivered by the network operators in Nigeria. We may not have good quality of service yet in Nigeria but most of the panelists alleged that we currently do not experience the worst quality of service. The representative of the NCC pointed out how the organisation is working with all the network operators to ensure the quality of services is improved.
The other panel session that was of interest to me was the one that focused on “services and profitability in the data era”. The highlights included how the OTT players can work together to overcome the barriers to market development while taking advantage of the revenue opportunities which data presents. The panelists included Bayo Adekanmbi (GM Business Intelligence, MTN), Usman Gumi (CEO, Gicell), and a senior representative of Airtel.
In one of the individual’s presentations, Yetunde Johnson (Network administrator, Aluko & Oyebode) make a good case for the use of cloud services. She shared a case study on how cloud is a viable business tool in Nigeria. The case study showed how her company has benefited immensely from using cloud services. She also talked about the already known challenges (power, infrastructure and insecurity issues) and what can be done to overcome these challenges. There was a presentation by Ehi Binitie (co-founder, Rancard Solutions) on “driving subscriber loyalty through connected mobile experiences”. He mentioned that with the right kind of customer engagement tactics, loyalty even in this day of mobile number portability can be achieved.
The day’s event eventually came to an end with an informal drink session hosted by Etisalat and a raffle draw where two people went home with different prizes (a Blackberry Z10 and Q10 phones). The events of day 1 actually set the expectation for day 2. Watch this space as we bring you the summary of day 2 activities.
