Cisco seeks to light up Africa with computing connectivity. While speaking at the Cisco Expo 2013 that took place at Sun City, South Africa, Cisco senior VP Howard Charney portrayed a picture of a future where everything is fully connected – people to people, people to machines and machine to machine, and global collaboration enables revolutionary new solutions.

Cisco points out that the data in circulation will grow exponentially, with up to 50 billion connected devices by 2020. “But it is not the data itself that will change the world, it’s the correlations, mining that data for value, and sharing of this data that will make the difference,” he said.

Charney reported that Cisco’s Internet of Everything is a significant initiative in which the company is positioning itself to catalyse this future. “Only 0.05% of the world’s available data is being mined for value currently. The next big step is connecting all the devices and mining all of the resulting data for value.

“The Internet of Everything is about the connection of everything to the global infrastructure, and critically – turning information into action. Things become apparent once they are connected. He also highlighted the potential to change people’s lives when all available data can be collated and shared.

The Internet of Everything really will be worth a little above USD14 trillion over the next ten years,” said Charney
According to Cisco South Africa MD Alpheus Mangale,Cisco has a vision to change the way people live, work and learn – particularly in Africa. “Africa may look like a dark continent in terms of connections at the moment, but it is a continent rich with potential and added that Cisco believes that together with their partners, they can light up Africa.”

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