Small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) must
leverage technology to be able to scale the challenges in the competitive global environment.
This is necessary to ensure that business decisions to drive change within corporate entities are taken based on concrete data and good available information.
These were some of the thoughts that came out of a workshop organised by Tri Continental Limited, UK, and Nigeria in collaboration with IBM Ghana aimed at showcasing new technology and software solutions and support services for both large and small businesses.
Tri Continental Limited is a major distributor of IBM Products and Services.
The workshop brought together IT Managers from various organisations drawn from Public Sector organisations and IBM local Business Partners.
"IBM Ghana is in the forefront of these processes to help SMEs with tools and technologies that will propel them make concrete decisions for improvement," said Mr Charles Ackeifi, an IBM Business Partner with CourtBridge Consulting Group.
Mr Ackeifi, who was speaking to the Ghana News agency after the seminar to introduce IBM offerings and services to clients, said SMEs would only be able to take efficient and effective decisions only when they had actual
data on business trends.
He said those times in which business decisions were taken without recourse to available information were long gone and SMEs must exploit available opportunities to drive change.
Mr Ackeifi underscored the readiness of IBM to support SMEs and group of individuals willing to work together to explore the opportunities of
putting in place the necessary processes to help lift their performance and reach.
"Indeed, through applications such as office productivity software and others, SMEs could be assisted to have their own data centre, domain names, mail server and the necessary back-ups at affordable cost," he said.
The Leader of the Tri Continental Team, Mr Sola Olojede, took the participants through various sessions, showcasing the new technology and offered them a smarter solution to support their services in their various institutions.
Mr Joe Mensah, Country General Manager- IBM Ghana, urged participants to look to IBM for Smarter ways to solve all their IT related challenges and join IBM in building a Smarter Planet.
Some of the solutions showcased at the seminar included IBM Systems X introducing the eX5 - the 5 Generation of System X, IBM Software Offerings - IBM Tivoli Foundations Software Appliances and Web Sphere Application Server.
The other topics discussed comprised IBM Power Systems Offering - Introduction POWER 7, IBM Storage Offerings - DISK and TAPE and IBM Service Offerings - Support and Services (GTS and MTS).