ICT in Kenya

“A company or software developer’s freedom of choice is secured with the use of free software, since it removes the vendor-lock imposed by proprietary owners”

Whenever one enters a cyber-café patronised by youthful clientele and looks around, the most striking thing is finding them almost uniformly glued to Facebook or to a lesser extent, other social sites like MySpace.

Unknown to many of them, these now vastly huge sites were the products of youths like them, mostly in the US, who came up with these ideas and developed them through hard work and a great deal of ingenuity.

It may not be easy for Kenyans to come up with a Facebook with over 200 million followers any time soon but if a local IT company has its way, a good start may be in the offing in the field of software development, the very backbone of the ICT industry everywhere, but which has not seemingly been much of a priority in Kenya.

Internet Communications Technology (or ICT) Consultants, a Nairobi-based information technology firm, is set to change this to a great degree, when it launches a software development platform meant to ease the creation of new programmes and business operations.

Prospective

The firm has partnered with FreeCode International, a company based in Norway that offers ‘open source’ software or free software, which any prospective software development aspirant as well as established companies can obtain from the Kenyan firm.

The Norwegian company also has a franchising or joint ownership option, which in the fast-growing Kenyan ICT field could prove to be a lucrative business in the not-too-distant future. Besides, it gives a convenient platform for those getting into content and data creation, either through the PC-based internet or increasingly, the mobile telephone.

According to ICT Consultants’ technical officer, Mr Alex Mutinda, open source software is ‘free’ such that once you posses it, you can create all sorts of programmes without worrying about restrictions usually imposed by the creators of such software or paying steep license fees.

“A company or software developer’s freedom of choice is secured with the use of free software, since it removes the vendor-lock imposed by proprietary owners”, says Mr Mutinda.

“What people have experienced is that the Microsoft Windows software commonly used — due to its hitherto tight lock on the software market worldwide — is expensive to run, especially for small and medium enterprises, it is prone to costly viruses and it’s not that secure from hacking. You have to buy virtually every piece of software the company comes up with and you don’t have much leeway with it”.

One totally owns this FreeCode software and it comes with the technical and systems back-up from the parent company.

Some ICT industry watchers contend that one of the biggest hindrances to the growth of software development in Kenya is that besides not having been a priority area in many computer studies with most learning only the basics of computing such as Windows, even those who have studied advanced courses such as JavaScript have had to depend on closed software options whenever they intended to use it for real business.

This has made it difficult and quite expensive for individual or small upstarts to make meaningful use of them.

Mr Mutinda says that whereas the FreeCode software is not itself expensive, its free nature allows companies to run the software for any purpose including human resources, enterprise resource planning (ERP), payroll systems and development of products among many others.

This, he says, is a boon not just to companies but also to those creative individuals wishing to enter into software development, especially those outsourced for by major companies.

A dynamic one which can be modified, updated, improved, or re-designed, he says it is a perfect tool for e-commerce, or for other aspects of data and content creation.

Fully-fledged

For the enterprise-minded, FreeCode International offers the option of owning a fully-fledged franchise, which gives one exclusive rights to a geographic area.

While it is also possible to have a joint venture or become a subsidiary of the Norwegian company, it says that “those entrepreneurs seeking to retain maximum control and profit of their operations, should opt for the franchise model after an initial licensing fee and franchise fee pegged on 10 per cent of gross revenue.”

This model, they say, is especially suitable in virtually virgin markets such as Kenya where computing requiring all manner of customised software is poised to grow enormously.

Although they do not indicate the cost for the free software preferring direct contact with clients, ICT Consultants itself, which presently has a franchise with FreeCode International to sell and promote this open source software, is already training its staff in preparation for roll-out and, according to its officials at a workshop held at a local hotel recently, targeting IT specialists and managers in the private and public sectors to highlight this software.

By ALLAN NGUGI Nation media group