The African ICT market is thriving and has reached a level of maturity that makes it easier for any-sized business to trade and compete.

Multiple server infrastructures is evidence of this growth and today small-to-medium sized organisations run the same amount of servers as larger enterprises did years ago. It makes for an interesting and vibrant market segment says George Zervos, VP Sales EMEA & Emerging Markets at KEMP Technologies.

KEMP Technologies is Southern Africa’s leading price/performance load balancer and application delivery controller.

Zervos agrees with industry analysts who highlight unified communications, ecommerce, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and CRM as main drivers behind the market.

“These are game-changing trends and underline the strategic importance of server infrastructure and their ability to accommodate mission-critical applications, ensure service delivery and the very best customer experience,” Zervos continued.

The key role played by load balancers is to share incoming connections across multiple hardware or virtual servers and this is done by directing traffic to the best performing, most accessible servers – based on aspects such as concurrent connections and CPU/memory utilisation.

In emerging markets there is renewed appreciation for the role of load balancing technology and this infrastructure is most certainly being seen in a new light – no longer a complex, troublesome investment, but a strategic business-building resource.

This thinking applies to all sized businesses and therein lies evidence of mature market – one in which all sized operations have access to this infrastructure and it is technology that is considered pivotal to any growth strategy going forward.

From an African point of view, this is imperative to the development of businesses (particularly within the high growth small-to-medium sized market) and that of economies.