[kictanet] Local hosting - reiterated

[robert yawe]

This says a lot about the governments lip service on vision 2030, the setting up 
of special economic zones and jua kali sheds is so industrial revolution 
thinking.

With technology the entire country becomes an special economic zone whose only 
infrastructure requirements are data centres and high speed broadband (wired or 
otherwise) all of which are much cheaper to install than 4 lane highways and 
11,000 kilo volt power sub-stations, or could it be the issue of 10%.

Kazi kwa vijani needs to look beyond the standard 8 drop out to the university 
graduate who already has the skills and is only looking for an enabling 
environment.  

Dr. Ndemo, I propose you call your counterpart in the Ministry of 
Industrialisation and which ever other ministry is involved in the jua kali shed 
project and insist to be given 1 shed in every constituency then take the cash 
equivalent and set-up a hosting and collocation centre.  

All it requires is 1000 square feet of space in your offices (digitise your 
files and move the physical ones to Kabartonjo).  From your offices get at least 
a 1 gigabit link to KIXP and as you are next to Oranges Telephone House which 
sits on a node of the Secom marine cable you can tap in for the international 
bandwidth.

The other link you require is to KeNET (http://www.kenet.or.ke), the education 
network hub, which I believe is currently asleep so that the location can be 
accessed across all universities.  This is critical as we know what happened 
when the developers of google and facebook went through when trying to host 
within their campuses.

If you leave the issue of hosting and collocation to market forces and private 
enterprise then our young developers and doomed to languish in poverty like our 
great artists.  This is the 1968 of technology time to setup an ICDC and KNTC 
type entities for the technology industry which you can then float like 
safaricom and kenya power after the market has matured.

From where I sit not even Safaricom or Airtel have the resources or willpower to 
salvage this situation.
 Robert Yawe
KAY System Technologies Ltd
Phoenix House, 6th Floor
P O Box 55806 Nairobi, 00200
Kenya


Tel: +254722511225, +254202010696




________________________________
From: Dennis Kioko <dmbuvi at gmail.com>
To: robertyawe at yahoo.co.uk
Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke>
Sent: Tue, 29 March, 2011 17:57:58
Subject: Re: [kictanet] Local hosting - reiterated

Developers and Local Hosting providers have for long been involved in the 
"chicken before the egg" situation where hosting firms say that demand has to 
increase for prices to come down, they have to justify investment. Developers 
meanwhile want prices to come down before they host locally, with some of them 
barely having budgets.  


At the same time, local hosting firms have to learn to offer world class cutting 
edge platforms and interfaces to their users if they are going to adopt them. 

At the same time, it aids when those providing this services go into technical 
details, like the type of databases offered, supported scripting languages 
rather than just tell us 2 databases, developers need that information. 

Rememeber there is tough competition from the likes of Amazon who have a robust 
cloud infrastructure which is free for low usage 
(http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/)

As a case study, a local developer has done a popular application , AroundMe 
(Nokia Ovi store - http://store.ovi.com/content/103911#/content/103911/reviews) 
which has been downloaded more than 10,000 times and with 30,000 searches. The 
app uses the Google App Engine (https://appengine.google.com/) cloud platform, 
also free to a certain usage . To now the app is still operating on the free 
limit (http://aroundmenow.appspot.com/). 


      
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