Fibre Optics Reduces Latency to 30% –Obioha

Phillip Obioha is the chief operating officer of Computer Warehouse Group and managing director of DCC Networks, Communications subsidiary of the group. He studied Electrical Electronic with options in Digital Electronics in the United States before coming to Nigeria. In his over two decades experience in Information and communications Technology industry, he worked with Inlaks as the Engineering Services manager and worked briefly with Spring Bank before joining CWG. He spoke to chike onwuegbuchi on how the plans of the group to revolutionize service delivery in the industry.

Zero Downtime in Banks
Yes, there can be zero downtime. As you are aware, anything that is of electronic component can go down at any point in time. The main issue is what is your response time and do you have a fault tolerance system around it? Again, the system we are building now, the MPLS network, is part of the advantages. When fibre is available, we will provide terrestrial connectivity to the site, then back it up with satellite so that if one goes down, the other would go up. The terrestrial network we are giving out is going to come with what we call traffic engineering. The whole idea is that if a fibre from a particular network gets cut, your network is up and running and for some we are going to have the satellite that was there to be a backup. By the time we finished the traffic engineering on our MPLS network, we will have zero downtime, because if one goes down, you have an alternative that will keep your network running. That is what we call a fault tolerant network and that is what we are building. We have 99.7 percent uptime on our networks but for anything that is electronically based, it has to go down at one point in time and that is why you have to build a fault tolerant system so that you can get zero percent downtime.
Affordability
We understand what the corporate environment is asking for, and what they are asking for is zero downtime systems and that is what we will give them. We would try to do that at a cost effective rate so we should be able to deliver this service to them at the same price they are already paying. It is something we have to make sure that they get.
Customer Support Services
You need to have a service desk, software driven tool where you have a number that people can reach you on when there is a problem. When they call, somebody picks the call, log it into the system and then from there try to solve the problem at the Network Operating Centre (NOC) immediately. If they do not fix it within a certain period of time, for instance 20 to 30 minutes, then a field engineer is dispatched. We have regional support offices so if you are to respond to a call from Sokoto, you do not start from Lagos here. We have a regional office up north where somebody would respond so that. We have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) signed with people and the SLAs says that if there is a problem, I must be there within a certain time and I must fix your fault within a certain time we adhere strictly to this. We have built up a service organization that makes sure we keep to those SLAs that we have signed, so it is managed that way. It is not that somebody calls you and if the SLA is two hours, you cannot be there in four or five hours. You have to create a service organization to make sure the service centre makes sure the SLAs are met by having regional support centres. If the problem is not solved remotely from the Network Operating Centre, an engineer is dispatched from wherever depending on where the fault is so that he can be there on time to meet up with the SLAs.
DCC Unique Value Proposition
The first thing that distinguishes DCC Networks, I would say is people. We have very dedicated staff because our environment and business is one that uses people. Our greatest assets are our staff. Of course we have tools, we have five satellite hubs and we made the investment so that we will be able to deliver services to corporates. We are focused on corporates and we made the correct investments to be able to deliver those services. We are not running up from hubs, there are some companies running from hubs abroad or sharing hubs with other people. We are a Nigerian company and we have made the necessary investments. Beyond those investments and tools that you give people, we pride the people themselves as one of our greatest assets. They are highly motivated, they are well trained so that they will be empowered to go out there and do their jobs and do it well.
Managing Different Partners  
We have what is called the Strategic Business Unit and in some of the companies they have what they call Product Champions. There we have people that interface with the OEMs, who manage the OEM relationships. We also have people who manage customer relationships from the other angle. The companies are different and they run independently.
Computer Warehouse Group
Computer Warehouse Group is an ICT Group that covers the whole spectrum of ICT- communications, hardware and software infrastructure. We have three different subsidiaries that focus on these areas. I will start with ExpertEdge Software Systems which is a software subsidiary of the Group. At ExpertEdge, we provide banking applications. Our flagship product is called Finacle, being run by about 11 banks and processes 60 percent of the total banking transactions in Nigeria because it runs in two largest banks of the 24 largest banks in the country, which are UBA and Fist Bank. Apart from that, ExpertEdge also implements SAP and Oracle and also provides enterprise security solution from Actimize. For Finacle, ExpertEdge has Infosys as partner. It also has SAP and Oracle as its partner and Actimize as partner for card applications. That is for the software angle.
The second one is the hardware infrastructure company, CWL Systems, which is where we started a long time ago in 1992 and is seen as a parent company, though we have a group name now. It is a hardware infrastructure company that provides hardware infrastructure right from the client, which is the desktop system to enterprise system. For the desktop, we mainly do Dell and for enterprise, we do Sun, IBM and HP but predominantly Sun Microsystems. We are a very strong partner to Sun. Beyond hardware infrastructure; we also do Automated Teller Machines (ATMs). We have deployed about 3,000 ATMs in Nigeria. We also provide storage solutions from EMC and NetApp.
The third company, which is the communications arm of the company, you know you need the hardware infrastructure and the software to run it and the equipment need to communicate with each other. The communications arm is called DCC Networks and was set up in 1998 as a Local Area Network (LAN) company before we went into enterprise networks using mainly satellite. We are very strong in satellite. We carry traffic for 21 out of the 24 banks on our satellite infrastructure. We also do systems integration mainly using Cisco products and we still do cabling and provide communications between sites or branches of banks using microwave technology. As for partners for DCC, we have Gilat Networks, we have Intelsat and others.
Agreement with Helios Towers             
DCC is presently building a strong terrestrial network, I mean peerless network which is based on fibre at the backbone and the Wimax infrastructure for the last mile. That project is going on now and like I said we are strong in satellite, we are strong in the corporate environment. We provide services to banks, the manufacturing and the oil and gas. Satellite has its advantages and disadvantages. It is expensive and slow in terms of latency because of that, since fibre has become available, we went to NCC and we got the radio frequency license. With that, we are building terrestrial networks on which we are going to migrate our corporate customers to and then we will probably provide satellite as a back up. The advantage of fibre is the latency; it brings down the latency from 60 percent down under a few seconds to something less than 30 percent. We are also able to provide bigger pipes. Right now, everybody is talking about broadband; we would be talking about broadband in the true sense so that people would be able to do more. To build that infrastructure, we are partnering with Helios Towers, we are collocating our base stations which is why we had an agreement with Helios Towers. For the fibre, we are partnering with MTN, Multilinks and a couple of others.
Partnering with Underseas Cable Providers
The satellite we use is called VPN within a geographical area. We operate within the geographical area called Nigeria; we have nothing to do with the international gateway. We use fibre so that the connections can be more efficient. This is like a closed system- corporate connectivity so that banks’ applications, their SMS and emails would run through this network. For the international gateway, which is a pipe to the outside world, to the internet backbone, we have some services like paging that we provide based on some particular satellite infrastructure. If you want to connect them using fibre, terrestrial network, that is where SAT 3, MainOne, Glo 1, WACS come in. These pipes are bringing in connectivity to our international gateway. Now that MainOne has become available, what we are going to do is to complement the satellite because the internet we use in this office is from us but is coming in through satellite. Now that MainOne is available, we can also take it through MainOne and cut down on the latency because satellite has a higher latency. As part of the build up of our corporate connectivity, the next step is to distribute bandwidth to the masses, either through MainOne or Glo 1 to Nigerians. We are talking about broadband through those pipes; we are talking about making very high internet speed available through those pipes.
Group Vision
We want to become a Pan African company. Hopefully by next year, we should become a public company. We want to become a Pan African company with branches in many African countries. We already have a full fledged office in Ghana, we just opened an office in Uganda which will be officially opened next month but the office is open and running. We hope to go to many other African countries and eventually we would like to be listed on the London Stock Exchange.