Salesforce launches in East Africa

American cloud computing solutions provider Salesforce has launched its services in the East African market, targeting regional governments, financial, manufacturing and the entertainment sectors.

“We are in discussions with some banks and insurance companies that are willing to take up the offer while the Kenyan government is considering our services in its push for online driven registration of its services,” said Francis Kaburu, managing partner at Blue Consulting.

Media houses are another target, Mr Kaburu, said as they seek to better relations between themselves and advertising companies.

Cloud computing is a way of delivering applications over the Internet — as a service. Instead of installing and maintaining software, companies can access it via the Internet, without needing to install complex software and hardware since the solution requires no software or hardware to buy, install, maintain, or upgrade.

Salesforce.com is designed to be as simple to use as sites like Amazon or Yahoo, said Mr Kaburu, while at the same time it’s capable of scaling from one user to hundreds of thousands of users in an organisation.

The company will employ local talent that will be assisting in setting up the cloud connection for clients, providing users and enterprises with various capabilities to store and process their data.

Vehicle tracking

One of East Africa’s government is considering a vehicle tracking deal with the British company, enabling the government to track any vehicle.

The Kenyan government said that it was seeking public private partnerships to ensure that its initiatives, especially at the Huduma Centres were a success.

“It is for this reason that the Ministry of ICT supports the initiative by Salesforce and its partners to promote an ecosystem of locally based intelligent young Kenyans to provide this kind of world class expertise. This is important, especially as the government embarks on major ICT infrastructure projects and nurturing local talent,” said Ezekiel Mutua, Information Secretary, at the Ministry of Information and Communications.

Salesforce said it is using Kenya as an entry into the East African market as the region adopts cloud computing to enhance safety and reliability in data transmission.

Salesforce serves more than 170,000 companies, among them Coca Cola, Bank of America, Philips and Virgin America and the Obama 2012 campaign.