Onyeje Calls for Collaboration on IT Development

Emmanuel Onyeje, country manager Microsoft has harped on the need for collaboration in the effort to help Nigeria as a nation imbibe IT and use it for development .Onyeje made the disclosure last week in Lagos during a quarterly meet with members of the Information and Communications Technology Correspondents Association of Nigeria (ICTCAN), a beat association for IT reporters
Onyeje maintained that collectively as IT stakeholders that we have a role to play in imparting IT on the society. He said Microsoft has invested so much in research& development and that the company has a chairman who is interested in making life better for people in every aspect of life be it in education, health, agriculture, sports etc. In public sector, Onyeje said technology makes things work for everybody disclosing that every automated teller machine in Nigeria has a Microsoft Windows running in it even as he reiterated the role of internet in agriculture and cited Kenya where a lot of farmers sell their products online. He looks forward to that happening in Nigeria.
Onyeje disclosed that Microsoft is one company that believes in partnership in whatever it does intimating that building local capacity is very important to the success of their business even as he said that Microsoft has 1,000 partners in Nigeria
He said that in a world that is full of distractions as a result of wars and natural occurrences that we should be able to change our direction when things change and that technology provides a platform which we can use to foster a change even in the era of economic downturn investing on four pillars of innovation which he mentioned as desktop, enterprise, entertainment and devices, and software and services. He mentioned the Microsoft has come out with Windows 7 Explorer which will be launched soon, to make sure that PCs get functionality.
Dele Akinsade, Services Lead, took journalists on the role of software and said that software simplifies how people work together, finds information and improves business insight. It also helps to protect and manage content and reduces IT cost.
Akinsade said that Microsoft is market leader in unified communications according to Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications survey in 2008 and also revealed  that most of the unified communications are number centric while  Microsoft’s  centres on people .
Marius Moantsoga, Lead, Small, Mid- market Solutions and Partners   said that virtualization has a critical role to play in saving costs in businesses. He explained that virtualization is consolidating what you do on many servers on just a single server and said the process reduces hardware needs. In addition to reducing cost, he said that virtualization increases efficiency as well as enabling business agility.
Jumai Umar-Ajijola, Citizenship manager Microsoft Nigeria explained the activities of her company towards making Nigerians integrate into the technology era. She said that the Innovative Teachers Forum which started in Nigeria in February 2008 , digital literacy curriculum, local language programme were some of the initiatives introduced by Microsoft in Nigeria  for the benefit of Nigerians.