And, says Sussman, SA companies can play a greater role in driving IT services and solutions through to the continent.

According to Integr8 IT, the ICT market in Africa has reached a higher level of maturity, and is more strategic in its approach to investment, skills development and innovation.

Our experience within this market is that business is aware of the need for prudence and forethought when making an investment in technology.

There is a realisation that product and solutions alone cannot solve all the issues, and that there needs to be a transfer of skills and business value in ventures, says Sussman.

As part of its strategy to push technology and reliable infrastructure North of the border, Integr8 IT technicians recently assisted Help Desk Solutions Botswana (HDS Botswana) and the Botswana Export Development and Investment Authority (BEDIA) with a high-level solution integration and installation.

The project centred around the installation of Disaster Recovery (DR) solution at BEDIA, in conjunction with the service provider HDS Botswana.

Aside from the provision of a fully redundant and available DR and business continuity solution, the client had to be moved to the next level in network redundancy.

Integr8 IT was contacted and recommended for the solution through Computer Associates (CA). The solution involved deploying CA Brightstor High Availability on six servers.

"This is an enterprise-level solution, allowing fault tolerance and server failover across a WAN link to the BEDIA DR site located 40km away from the head office, explains Eirin Lankwarden, Integr8 IT Consultancy Services (ICS).

According to Lankwarden, Integr8 ITs role had been formulated during the initial stages of meetings.

The primary aim was to deploy the solution for HDS Botswana as well as provide a skill and knowledge transfer. The latter is an important pre-requisite for trade and development in the country and companies are keen to leverage off international skills.