COSTA (Corner Stone Africa LTD)

21/03/2013

MTI Consulting (www.mtiworldwide.com ) , keeping in line with their international expansion strategy, in yet another ground
MTI Consulting (www.mtiworldwide.com ), keeping in line with their international expansion strategy, in yet another ground breaking move, signed up with Corner Stone Africa Limited (COSTA) to access the country for MTI's strategy consulting and business advisory solutions.

Corner Stone Africa Ltd was founded by a team of professionals from the East African region with diverse experiences after having been motivated by concern of the serious gap in workforce skills not merely in Rwanda but also in the rest of the region. The founders of COSTA were further moved by the desire to give back to the community part of their experience. Joshua Mbaraga –Managing Director of COSTA quoted to us "We were born of and developed by this community; we find it our duty to give back". COSTA facilitates organizations to identify their challenges and helps them to craft industry-lead and innovative solutions that will enable them to keep ahead of their competition. COSTA groups their activities under Technical and Vocational Training, System Solutions and, Professional Outsourcing Services, making them a one-stop-centre for skills development. Additionally they also offer follow on support to guarantee sustainability of the solutions.

MTI Consulting is an international management consultancy, with operations across Asia and the Middle East and networked across the Americas, Africa and Europe. Since 1997, MTI has delivered over 450 projects in 40 countries, applying MTI’s ’Analyze > Strategize > Realize’ approach. Strategy Consulting is the core focus, with specializations in Corporate Finance, Market Research, Technology Advisory and HRM Solutions.

Rwanda is the bridge between the forest ecosystems of the Congo basin and the great rift valleys of the East. It shares in biological riches of both worlds, offering a concentration of biodiversity found nowhere else in Africa. Any local or foreign investor would declare that doing business in Rwanda is a breeze because of its investor friendly climate, sustained high growth, robust governance access to regional markets and untapped investment opportunities.

The World Bank ’Doing Business Report 2010’ recognizes Rwanda as the world’s top business reformer; so does the Commonwealth Business Council who awarded it the African Business Award 2010, for most improved business climate. Rwanda is a very different country from what it was for most of its post-independence history. It is one of the safest places in Africa, as well as the least corrupt. This is not only an opinion of Foreign Investors but a fact that has been achieved through immense efforts by the Government and the people of Rwanda. Rwanda has a development oriented Government committed to the transformation of the economy into a regional hub for services and industry. The development Roadmap Vision 2020 specifies development targets for the nation, which make it an investment location well worth considering.

10/10/2012

Unveiling ICT secrets- Part III
By Joshua Mbaraga
If you have been following my articles, you probably have a fair idea of what network congestion is and its probable causes. In brief we said that “network congestion” is a state of user-visible degradation of network performance. It occurs when network assets are not able to process data as fast as users may wish, which makes this definition rather relative. We also said that Network Congestion is caused by either overload on the individual network assets or limited capability of the assets or both.
Depending on what a network is used for, network delays may or may not be categorized as congestion and this is where the ICT wizards may take us for a ride. As long as the network is maintained within the congestion-prone level or below, one may argue that the network does not warrant instituting congestion management solutions, some of which may be expensive. Net work Managers that are not customer focussed will only take measures when network jamming occurs; that is, when data loss is experienced.
A case in point is the internet café. A network of twenty high- speed computers connected to a very low speed switch and low speed interface will cause network congestion while a similar network with ten computers only will not On the other hand if the ten computers are all used to stream music and video they could lead to congestion compared to the twenty if used for IM or email applications only. The same thing applies to your organization network. If all users decided to download heavy files at the same time, network congestion is likely to occur irrespective of how modern your network is. Fortunately most modern network assets have in-built mechanisms that may enable the network to avoid jamming.
Solutions to network congestion are based on either avoidance or control principles. Whereas the control solutions may be easy to conceive since one is dealing with known parameters, avoidance becomes challenging mainly because the likely cause of congestion will not be known. Congestion avoidance solutions are those that will enable the network to operate below the congestion-prone region while Congestion control ones are those that will provide a recovery mechanism once a network has entered into a congestion mode.
Although switching assets in a network have inbuilt mechanisms for individual asset congestion management, end-to-end congestion management remains a challenge mainly because of its dynamic and distributed nature. Existing engineering solutions are based on dynamically increasing the available network resources or dynamically decreasing the demand on available resources.
New technologies, however, have enabled network users to get access to more data and to demand for more speed, reliable and fair delivery. This puts a challenge to engineering solutions. Increasing available resources becomes limited by both cost and available technologies while decreasing the demand amounts to service degradation, including unfair distribution of resources. Also as users put varying data loads on the network, congestion becomes unpredictable, which puts more challenge to engineering solutions. The unpredictable loads will result into some assets being underutilised when the demand is low or available assets being overloaded when the demand is high. In the next issue we shall look at user- based solutions which I believe are more cost effective solutions.
The writer is the Managing Director of Cornerstone Africa Ltd (www.cornerstone-africa.com)
Contact: [email protected]; Tel: +250 788 302477.

Cornerstone Africa, Corner Stone Africa, technical and vocational training, Technical solutions and consultancy, Professional outsourcing

14/09/2012

24/08/2012

Unveiling ICT secrets

May be you have ever visited an internet café with a hope of making a quick glance through your emails or a quick web search only to end up waiting indefinitely for “network”. May be you have been lucky to get connected only to hang in waiting for logon and ended up with a message like “this page has expired” or a similar one. Then you probably stormed out of the café throwing four-lettered curses at everybody but yourself.
The other day I sent an SMS to friend of mine at 9 O’clock in the evening and he received it at 3 O’clock in the morning. You should have seen his reply calling me all sorts of names for disturbing his sleep! You probably have ever tried to send a New-year SMS to your loved one only to learn the next day that it was never delivered or was delivered the next day.
If you identify with such scenarios and wish to understand why they happen then bolt up and read on. What you have experienced is a phenomenon known as Network Congestion, which from a user point of view, could be defined as a user-visible degradation of network performance. From a technical point, congestion may be said to occur when available network assets used to establish network communications are not enough to establish all required communications. In other words, congestion occurs when the demand for network assets is greater than the supply.
Before we get too technical, I believe that it is prudent that we understand what a communication network is. It is not easy to define a communication network in a few words mainly because of its complicity. I will, instead, endeavour to give an overview of what a communication network consists of and what it does rather than trying to define it. In general terms, a communication network could be defined as an infrastructure of interconnected communication devices used for exchange of information between different users. The communication devices include telephones, computers of different types, a communication link and switching devices. This is a very simplistic approach in which communication devices have been considered as black boxes, which is not the case. Communication networks are much more complex than this and have evolved from the early telephone based networks to modern day computer based ones.
Considering a computer based network, congestion could be understood better by considering the phenomenon of end-to-end packet data transmission in a network, or network throughput. In this case, congestion could be defined as a situation whereby the number of data packets being transmitted through a network approaches the packet handling capacity of that network. In other words congestion occurs when the network throughput approaches zero. This is analogous to a highway with the numerous cars as data packets. When congestion occurs all cars come near to a stand-still.
Causes of congestion may be either due to insufficient network assets at a particular time or pushing too many packets into the network at the same time, the later being user dependent while the former is equipment dependent.
When congestion occurs the following scenarios may manifest:
a) In the extreme case the packets may be dropped. This may result into failure to establish the communication and, therefore, a waste of upstream transmission capacity. This scenario occurs mainly during peak hours of communication.
b) In less extreme cases the packets may be rerouted through other available assets causing multi-hop paths that may result into transmission timeouts or delays due to retransmissions.
Irrespective of whatever may cause network congestion, suffice it to say that network congestion will frustrate users and destroy their confidence in the network. In subsequent articles we shall see how you and I contribute to our own frustrations and what we can do to help alleviate the situation.
The writer is the Managing Director of Cornerstone Africa Ltd.
Contact: [email protected]

04/08/2012

We are now on facebook.....like our page as we take Africa by storm