Accra, Nov. 30, GNA - The Country Manager of Computer Warehouse Group (CWG) Ghana, Mr Tony Dadzie said small and medium scale enterprises, which were reluctant to deploy technology to automate their operations, risked being marginalised in the global market. He said while large firms rolled out ICT infrastructure in all aspects of their operations, most small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) were reluctant to automate.

Mr Dadzie, who was speaking to the Ghana News Agency at a seminar on Virtual Cloud Computing (VCloud) in Accra, said there were tremendous possibilities in technology and software to help SMEs reduce Information Technology (IT) infrastructure costs and thereby becoming competitive. VCloud, he observed, represents the next wave of virtualisation and offers significant market opportunities by providing a new, simpler, and much more pervasive platform for on-demand, desktop and application service delivery.

The day's seminar which was attended by IT decision-makers was on the theme: "Virtualisation and Storage in Ghana." Mr Dadzie said while global technology was developing at a fast pace, IT technology in Ghana was moving at a rather slow pace, necessitating the need for scaling up usage in most operations. He said what companies needed to do was to explore smart ways of beating the costs and other challenges of deploying IT technology. Mr Dadzie said CWG Ghana had enjoyed good success in its five years of operations and was set to replicate the tremendous success of its parent company in Nigeria.

CWG is an African focused operations with a vision of being present in 10 African countries by 2011. Currently, the company is present in Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda. VMware's Business Manager, Mr Emmanuel Adeogun, who spoke on the topic: "Amplifying Business Value through IT," explained that VCloud was essentially about optimising cost by doing more with less in IT. Mr Adeogun said VCloud was an approach to computing that leverage the efficient pooling of on-demand, self-managed services and could help organisations cut cost dramatically and redirect such savings to investment. Mr Rex Mafiana, Country Manager, NetApp Ghana and Nigeria reiterated that doing more with less is essentially premised on shared IT infrastructure.

"Doing business as usual is not the winners choice. Maximising value requires thinking," Mafiana said, adding that VCloud is not all about the physical infrastructure, but mainly about processes and thinking. Cloud computing has been described as a new supplement, consumption, and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, and it typically involves over-the-Internet provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources. 30 Nov. 10