Global Dispatches: African countries seek more BPO business

Computerworld - African Countries Try to Boost BPO Investments
ACCRA, Ghana -- Following a route that was blazed by India and the Philippines, countries throughout Africa are trying to become competitive destinations for business process outsourcing (BPO) by promoting low-cost labor, offering tax breaks and building up their IT infrastructures.
KenCall EPZ Ltd. recently opened in Nairobi as Kenya's first international call center, for instance. Mauritius is building a second "cyber tower" office building in the city of Ebene to host BPO vendors. And Botswana is making a big push for BPO investments with a favorable corporate tax rate of 15% that's guaranteed until June 2020.
South Africa leads Africa's BPO sector with call centers and all types of back-office operations, said Peter Ryan, an analyst at London-based Datamonitor PLC. In South Africa, call center agents are paid an average of 30% less than they are in the U.K., speak English as a first language and can handle complex, unscripted calls, said Luke Mills, executive director of CallingtheCape, a nonprofit agency that promotes the call center outsourcing industry in Cape Town.
• John Yarney, IDG News Service
Aussie Broadcaster Builds Digital Archive
SYDNEY -- Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC) this month will begin digitizing its entire film and radio archive, in a $15 million (Australian) project that may set a national record for digital storage capacity.
The archive will grow to 1.5 petabytes in three to five years, without counting new content, said Fred Spark, manager of systems management services at the Sydney-based broadcaster. ABC has set up a workshop where three shifts of seven people will do the labor-intensive conversion work, he said.
Over the past nine months, the company has installed IBM servers, storage arrays and tape libraries to support the digital archive.
Tape is the best option for an archive of the size planned by ABC, Spark said. He added that the data will be readily accessible for producers to retrieve footage and audio reports "in minutes rather than hours or days."
• Rodney Gedda, Computerworld Australia
North and South Korea Connect Telecom Cables
TOKYO -- Fiber-optic cables in North Korea and South Korea were interconnected last week, marking the first time that telecommunications networks between the two countries have been joined.
The cables, which belong to KT Corp. in the south and state-run Korea Post and Telecommunications Corp. in the north, will be used to provide communications and Internet services between the two nations, said KT spokeswoman Suzie Nam.
The linkage is expected to be especially important for