JSE-listed technology group Gijima has its sights on the local telecommunications market. It says it will either acquire or partner with a company that has its own network.

CEO Jonas Bogoshi says Gijima has decided to play a more direct role in cloud computing, including hosted services and voice and data technologies.

However, he says the company lacks the network infrastructure to make the new focus work properly for the business.

“It is the last requirement to make a consolidated go of the market. If we don’t do it, we will lose out,” he says.

Over the next 18 months, Gijima will actively look for a telecoms business that has its own infrastructure. It will then acquire or partner with that company.

Bogoshi says Gijima does not plan to seek its own telecoms network licence or to roll out its own infrastructure, mainly because that would prove too expensive. “It is a costly exercise, and it will cost more to train the skills we need to run a telecoms network,” he says.

However, he says the group is willing to pay for another business that already has the skills and infrastructure in place.

There are several market players Gijima could go after. At the beginning of 2009, around 300 communications providers were licensed by the Independent Communications Authority of SA to build their own networks, independent of larger players such as Telkom, MTN and Vodacom.

Though Bogoshi won’t say which companies Gijima is eyeing, analysts say unlisted ECN Telecommunications is a possibility. Another is AltX-listed Vox Telecom, which has a market value of nearly R500m.

Gijima already serves PABX — or traditional business telephony — solutions to approximately 2 000 customers and has plans to provide voice-over-IP services to at least some of those.

Bogoshi says managed voice services will boom in the next few years, especially given cuts in interconnection rates — the fees operators charge each other to carry calls on their networks.

Gijima has already started work on the first phase of its cloud computing plans and will have an integrated service centre up and running by October.

It’s building a data centre to provide remote hardware support and monitor systems that Gijima has put in place at its customers.

The company put together a task team at the beginning of the year to investigate cloud services and create a roadmap for the group to bring cloud computing to its customers.

“We can’t ignore the fact that cloud computing is becoming more popular in SA. Customers may still be a little reluctant, but they will eventually take up some cloud services,” says Bogoshi. — Candice Jones, TechCentral