Technology is to the world as oxygen is to the blood. The world through its people and systems have become immersed in technology, in some form or other, by virtue of its enablement and efficiency. The path forward is predicated upon greater complexity due to converging technologies and an increased volume, variety and velocity of data. As a result, being dynamic, agile and innovative is the key to solving the challenges of today and tomorrow using technology as an enabler, creating an inclusive society by developing digital skills matched to job demand and developing an environment conducive to growth.
As Africa’s leading technology services provider, EOH is at the forefront of digital convergence, innovation, and transformation, and with representation across Africa, UK, Europe and the Middle East we are able to leverage and scale our value proposition and offerings across multiple markets. EOH sits at the heart of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) with an ability to provide end-to-end solutions that solve business and societal challenges. This places us in a strong position to support business, society and ecosystems looking to grow, enhance efficiency, solve challenges and or improve service capability and delivery through innovation and technology. We pride ourselves on being agile, collaborative, partner-centric and solution minded.
A diverse offering
EOH plays a pivotal role in solutioning for now and the future, from legacy to digital transformation, utilising its broad technology base (including its 50+ OEM strategic partnerships) and services capability. The EOH business comprises three core business segments offering differentiated value propositions: iOCO, NEXTEC and RocketLab.
With a permanent staff complement of circa 5500, including over 4000 technical staff, EOH takes a design-led, solution minded, customer-centric approach to solving challenges, through on–and–off-premise solutions, such as: cloud-ready, mobile-enabled, microservices-oriented architectures, across all industry verticals, including agriculture, banking, education, energy, health, insurance, mining, public sector, retail and telecommunications.
iOCO is the leading specialist African ICT systems integrator and aggregator focused on traditional and cutting edge technology solutions, hardware and software product, and services across the ICT value chain NEXTEC comprises a diverse set of people outsourcing and intelligent infrastructure capability. NEXTEC consults, designs, implements, monitors and services intelligent infrastructure in smarter buildings; warehousing and logistics; intelligent mining; asset management; water, sanitation and energy management; and lots more. NEXTEC is building better cities and civil infrastructure for tomorrow, today.
RocketLab, is our IP platform and innovation business, comprising multiple solutions including: digital signatures built off a consent engine with an auditable repository; clinical trials; fraud and forensics; human resources and governance and compliance solutions.
These cumulative offerings allow us to apply an unparalleled toolbox of skills and technologies to solve challenges, support our customers and ecosystems, through our expert capability in infrastructure, software and applications, and or our augmented 4IR digital capability in cloud, security, application development, data and data services, automation, software quality assurance, intelligent cities, and public, private and civil sector digital transformation.
Part of being innovative and solving with purpose requires an understanding of the customer need and context, their ambition, what their challenges are, what their current environment and architecture looks like and what their aspirations are (both business and technical), then onward to co-creating a sustainable and beneficial solution. In this regard, we lead with advisory and thought leadership to ensure that we have the right blueprint regardless of where our customers are in their digitalisation journey. Being practical, working incrementally, and building for a brighter tomorrow is all part of the way we work with customers and partners.
South African innovation in practice
We are humbled by our success in delivering innovative solutions for our customers. Some of the cutting-edge innovative offerings we have developed and implemented include the following:
• Involved in the design, development, implementation, maintenance and support of a revenue service web-based efiling platform consisting of a web-based mobile user interface for automatic efiling registrations and auto-assessments, various back-end services to support user services, and a database to store the data and extensive integration resulting in a significant cost saving through automation, efficiency and optimisation.
• A major continental Telco required a panAfrican API infrastructure for integration across Africa, including third-party business entities, from conceptualisation to production. This solution delivered required education, change management, implementation of effective monitoring, support and configuration of strong delivery teams per region.
• Delivered a claims automation solution for a large global reinsurer with internal and external integration, and processing mapped to business and workflow rules.
• Provided a smart logistics solution for major rail carrier using data, analytics, infrastructure to automate data capture across multiple instances resulting in increased efficiency and drastically reducing costs
A digital transformation journey was accomplished with luxury homeware retailer by removing their manual paper based onboarding and selling process with a sleek mobile app thereby significantly reducing time-consuming admin tasks, digitising their recruitment, real-time credit vetting and reducing the sales order process from six weeks to real-time.
The nature, value proposition and suite of technology solutions of EOH positioned us perfectly to assist customers with their needs pre and post COVID-19, whether it related to their increased infrastructure requirements, remote and agile working solutions, enhancement of security and business processes or the move to cloud. iOCO’s Impression solution, for example, enables customers to view, sign, and send sensitive documents on any connected device conveniently, securely and with full legal compliance.
Digitally enabling South Africa’s socio-economic development
Whilst a technology aggregator enterprise needs to be innovative and progressive in providing the best solutions to its ecosystem, this success cannot and should not be in isolation of society. For this reason and as a good corporate citizen, EOH willingly contributes to the greater good of the environments and industries it operates within.
We support organisations, industry bodies and public-private partnerships through our technology and people capability. An example of this is our Governance Risk and Compliance platform, Cerebro, which supports companies with holistic integrity at the foundation of its business, as we do. Trust and integrity are not only a differentiator but also an enabler of substantive value add partnerships for a sustainable business and the growth of the fiscus. This mindset and methodology are a catalyst for inclusivity by creating opportunity for people in the forms of both skills development and supporting entrepreneurship.
A larger pool of relevant skills not only supports our customer base more effectively but also makes South Africa an attractive investment destination to onshore and reshore business to reduce unemployment, broaden our economy and stimulate growth. To catalyse this growth, we believe that e-commerce is important aided by digital platforms, which we build, have built and support. Consider a small-scale fruit farmer in Limpopo (a province in South Africa). She might not want to become a robotics specialist to realise production efficiencies, but she could benefit from joining a blockchain-based financial services platform that allows her to easily generate verifiable yield and financial records, and puts her in touch with global value chains.
The possibilities exist, we just need to enable them for the greater good.
Innovation enabling growth, efficiency and optimisation
Information technology (IT) and Operational technology (OT) convergence continues to accelerate and companies can no longer ignore the transformational opportunities they offer to fuel the return on investment.
Combining the right technologies to simplify, design, automate and manage processes across the organisation instead of using tools that are script-based and designed for narrow use cases, alongside the integration of machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), has proven to vastly improve operational discipline and performance, reveal business anomalies, generate valuable insights and optimise workloads.
The zero-trust security model is reshaping the traditional approach to cybersecurity. No device or system should be trusted without verification, and even then, it should be regularly scanned for breaches.
The increase in the number of employees working remotely, at least part-time, appears to be durable, resulting in a shift to technologies that enable collaboration, improve the employee experience, engagement and performance goal-setting. This also comes with increased opportunities to use data to track not only employee productivity, but employee engagement and wellbeing.
It is becoming fundamentally important for companies to recalibrate their organisations (change the way they do and think about things) and work on HOW they do it – for example, behaviour-driven design, UI/UX, info-driven architecture, DevOps and automated testing.
EOH is and will continue to remain at the forefront of providing such end-to-end solutions to support our customers and ecosystems along their journey of digital transformation with both traditional and innovative solutions.
