Guroo Business: Africom’s new complete packages for businesses

Africom, under their Guroo, banner is now offering complete packages for the ICT side of varying sized businesses. These come as compiled modules which encompass ALL ICT aspects of businesses. According to Africom’s Enterprise Manager Tafadzwa Ndudzo, these modules, which include parts like telephony, local domain registration and email hosting help businesses to engage with just one ICT company for all the business’ ICT aspects, this avoids the hassle of engaging with many companies for different ICT products. (Paraphrased)

Ndudzo presented four of these newly compiled modules which are as follows:

1. Guroo Basic Small Business
2. Guroo Basic Plus Small Business
3. Guroo Classic Medium Business
4. Guroo Flexi Corporate Business

Each module has the following parts

New products

Noticeably new in range of products are the Cumulus ERP, Unified communication and Collaboration components. On Cumulus ERP, last year Africom announced it was partnering MTN to offer cloud hosted services that included email and a small business ERP solution called SAP Business One. It was unclear then if they would offer the ERP component via MTN Business  or 23^rd Century Systems, who have already launched SAP Business, one locally under the brand Cumulus. They chose Cumulus. Strangely though, Cumulus, the way we understood it, was targeted at small to medium businesses. Africom have it even in the Corporate Business category above.

On Unified communication Tafadzwa Ndudzo said this includes things like instant messaging (chat), video conferencing and data sharing. In definition he said “this is not necessarily a single product, but a set of products that provide a unified user-interface and user-experience across multiple devices and media-types.”

On explaining the collaboration offering the Ndudzo said these are tools “centered around attaining collective intelligence and staff collaboration at the organization level, or with partners. These include features such as staff networking, expert recommendations, information sharing, expertise location, peer feedback, and real-time collaboration. The tools will be delivered as a cloud service using Microsoft SharePoint.

SharePoint can be used to provide intranet portals, document and file management, collaboration, social networks, extranets, websites, enterprise search, and business intelligence.”

Pricing

The prices of these modules are said to be released tomorrow, thus we are still to obtain more information concerning the specifications of the products e.g. voice and data tariffs and charges on domain registration etc.  Ndudzo was quick to mention that the pricing will be flexible i.e. if you already have some aspects of the packages (say telephony and internet access) the prices are then discounted to be proportional to the resources that you really require.

Last Word

These packages are helpful in avoiding the running around done by business people to get different ICT products from different companies. Africom is now a one stop shop for these products, however the viability of this venture really depends on pricing and how seamless the products will work together otherwise the model breaks down. We are hoping that since all the products are coming from one company their prices will be lower than the sum of the ICT products’ prices from the cheapest suppliers. The cost of getting them separately at least.

We will be posting more information on the pricing of the products after we get the fuller press release tomorrow.