By Moses Nosike

Dr Alex Ndukwe is the Chief Executive Officer, Tekville Systems Nigeria,an ICT systems and Power firm based in  Abuja. Its clientele base cuts across the private and public sectors. Tekville system also deploys solar power solutions, others.

Ndukwe

In this interview with Nosike Moses, Dr. Alex Ndukwu revealed how his 20 years experience managing information technology infrastructure has repositioned the company for business success. Excerpts:

Having managed information technology infrastructure for 20 years, how can you rate Nigeria in this space?

Nigeria rating is below average, we still have high rate of failed ICT projects in the public sector, though we have associations that should serve as regulators, unfortunately they have a different agenda. Legislations, concerned associations should see that laws are enacted to improve ICT.

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For instance, “Cyber Security”, private sector is the most hit with respect to losses that run into billions of Naira. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has imposed a cyber security levy of 0.005 percent on service charge collected by payment service providers, PSPs, on electronic payment transactions, this is in compliance of Cyber security ACT of 2015.

This ACT has a lot of flaws which should be reviewed. I don’t want to dwell so much on this, I would like to share our experience with an MDA. My staff made an attempt to sell a preventive maintenance package to them and got this response, “we don’t repair our systems, once it’s faulty, we throw it away and buy a new one”, this reveals that maintenance of ICT equipment is non existent. Servers, data are not protected, networks are open to vulnerabilities.

There is need to embrace maintenance culture so as to ensure that lifespan of these assets are archived and reduce total cost of ownership, productivity is guaranteed since downtime would be reduced or completely eliminated.

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For technology transfer, ease of doing business in Nigeria, the government is doing its best, private sector should get involved, we need to move to the next level, local content should be encouraged, most Nigerian businesses engage Indian experts at the detriment of Nigerians. I want to urge our associations to push for legislation that will take care of this age long issues, we are developing their economies.

We need to change our attitude when it comes to ICT and power infrastructure deployment and management, standards should not be compromised at the private sector, especially the banks you will notice that power infrastructure is usually neglected , UPS’s are always breaking down because of poor power inputs, earth leakage. The personnel don’t pay attention to this details, power audits should be conducted monthly and not when there is an issue, we need to stop fire fighting.

What is Tekville’s contribution to improve information technology infrastructure in Nigeria?

We have a number of products for our clients, barracuda, an IT security products which is the best in the world used by 150,000 firms. It takes care of vulnerabilities of all kinds, ensuring your staff, Data and environments are protected.

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Wowbii interactive boards that aid interaction, collaboration, presentation and video conference. This device replaces whiteboard, flip chart, projector, multimedia recorder, meetings and training is made convenient and professional. We provide cost effective filtered power maintenance, sales and support, our personnel are well trained, exposed and equipped with state of the art tools.

Well we need to improve, we lack maintenance culture in Nigeria and the service firms need to support their clients in terms of cost, ensure they are more professional in their conduct, this is lacking in our country. We need to use tools to aid our troubleshooting, diagnosis, investigations while working at sites.