Enabling Digital Transformation in South Africa

South African companies are increasingly embracing digital transformation strategies to remain competitive in the new digital economy. Digital transformation strategies are typically focussed on improving interaction with customers and partners, reducing operational inefficiencies, lowering costs and unlocking new business opportunities.

According to Cornastone Director, Ansu Sooful, in order to ensure successful digital adoption, companies will require skilled resources who can rapidly deliver key digital innovative solutions. Cornastone is therefore investing in digital skills development

“It is Cornastone’s experience that South Africa currently has a significant shortage of API management skills. As a result, Cornastone has partnered with Apigee (a wholly owned Google company), to develop local competency and skills in API management.  By September 2017, Cornastone will have successfully trained and certified over a dozen Apigee resources who can provide professional API Management Services to various public and private sectors,” says Sooful.

Cornastone is currently in discussions with various parties to provide Digital Transformation development centres in South Africa, with the aim of building skills that will benefit in building our country’s digital economy. “If we as a country are unable to build the necessary skills that are required to function in a digital economy, South Africa will remain stagnant in comparison to the rest of the world. Hence the urgency to focus on capacity building in technologies such as API Management, Big Data and Robotic Process Automation that drives the adoption and growth of Digital Transformation in an increasing complicated economic environment,” says Sooful.

About Cornastone

Cornastone Enterprise Systems (Pty) Ltd is a leading South African Information, Communication and Technology company that operates in the Southern African region. The company has 3 offices located in Rivonia (Head Office), Centurion and Cape Town. The company has a current staff compliment of 175 people and provides solutions to both public sector and corporate customers. Since Cornastone’s acquisition by EOH we are able to leverage EOH competencies and specialised resources across a broad spectrum of services. Cornastone is ISO 9002 compliant and a Level 2 B-BBEE Contributor.

Our certified Apigee team together with Abdullah Ahmed (Apigee Trainer) Cape Town

At Cornastone, innovation and thinking out-of-the-box, is a way of life. We recognise the importance of innovation in maintaining a competitive edge. Our innovation programme also directly contributes to the development of South Africa’s knowledge economy.

According to a recent World Bank report, “The emergence of the global knowledge economy has put a premium on learning throughout the world. Ideas and know-how as sources of economic growth and development, along with the application of new technologies, have important implications for how people learn and apply knowledge throughout their lives.”

These are the principles that guide our actions in all we do, both internally and externally. Our team has since 2016. been holding regular Think Tank initiatives where external speakers have the opportunity to showcase their areas of expertise, stimulate critical thinking and be a catalyst for further action amongst the team.

Two Cornastone representatives recently returned from the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona and the first Think Tank for 2017 was inspired by some of the key learnings taken from MWC 2017.

The mobile industry was incidentally the first industry to adopt the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, under the theme “connecting all to a better future”.

One of the underlying passions shared by many of the committed Cornastone staff is the pursuit of new technology to solve social problems.

To this end, the development and possibilities of 5G technology was a highlight of the discussion.

In a world where heterogeneous networks work in synergy to provide high speed, low latency always on connectivity, the connected individual becomes a reality. This is effectively 5G technology in action.

5G will require a multitude of disparate network elements working together to provide high-speed data networks. It is impossible for existing solutions to support this type of network.

In a future world, machine learning and self-healing networks are essential to make 5G networks function.

Cornastone’s strategic focus on IoT platforms, APIs, big data, analytics, process robotics, smart city/tech, customer experience, and cloud is headed in the right direction and is leading us to what is called the 4th industrial revolution.

This is just the start of an ongoing discussion and the creation of thought leadership around how Cornastone can harness new technology to improve business processes for our clients and simultaneously contribute to social development solutions on an international platform.

At Cornastone, innovation and thinking out-of-the-box, is a way of life. We recognise the importance of innovation in maintaining a competitive edge and for this Cornastone was officially recognised as the “Most Innovative Medium Enterprise Company in South Africa for 2016”. Think Tank was established to cultivate exactly that. Through our innovation program, we are directly contributing to the development of South Africa’s knowledge economy. Think Tank is rooted in the premise that today’s revenue stream will have disappeared in three years and new business opportunities must be identified and acted upon now. The level of engagement and critical thinking has grown exponentially as a result and this initiative has become a regular feature within our organisation.