Retrieved from Allafrica News
 http://allafrica.com/stories/200209260515.html

ITWeb (Johannesburg)
September 26, 2002 
Posted to the web September 26, 2002 
By  Gerrit Mostert

African resellers, like their counterparts on other continents, are increasingly acknowledging the importance of their own IT skills to sustain business.

Gerrit Mostert, account manager Sun Educational Services MEA, commented at the recent Sun and cdpAFRICA Africa Partner Summit held at Stellenbosch, that Sun resellers and their customers have shown a great deal of interest in being trained in order to sell solutions with more confidence and knowledge.
"Africa is an emerging market, where not only solutions but skills drive and sustain business. Sun Educational Services aims to enable this." In a recent server and systems survey, leading research authority Forrester said: "Over 70% of companies involved in major migrations of legacy, client/server and Internet systems state their IT development plans are limited by the current skills of their staff." 

As the need for training increases, so unauthorised training becomes more of an issue. Mostert comments that unauthorised training is definitely on the rise. At Sun, for example, an institution has to be ASEC (Authorised Sun Education Centre) certified, in order train people. However, not all resellers and their customers realise this, and this is why Sun aims to provide Africa with the proper and authorised training, enabling them to become Sun Certified as well as ensure business sustainability. "Our aim is to bring Sun training right to their doorsteps. Not all African resellers have the money and the means to send five to six staff members for training in SA."

Sun's initial focus will be on East and West African countries, such as Nigeria and Kenya, where Sun Certified training including workgroup certification, datacentre certification and enterprise server certification will be provided. From there, Sun will move into French Africa. "We've found that there's a great need for Solaris Operating Environment (OE) administrators, systems and network administrators," concludes Mostert.