Telkom’s subsidiary, BCX, recently held a virtual tech conference called XCITE20, using a platform it created.
With many professionals having made the switch to working primarily at home due to social distancing, large conferences have also become a virtual affair in recent months. This may provide an opportunity for technology companies to create robust and easy-to-use online conferencing services, in the same way Zoom and Microsoft Teams have seen an increase in usage for meetings and learning.
BCX chief of marketing Mandisa Ntloko-Petersen says they were considering packaging their conferencing platform as a service for clients.
“We’re actually in discussion with one of our clients that is looking to have a conference in September. We might be helping them with use of this platform.”
For now, she says, they will be using the platform for their “client experience centre” where BCX can demonstrate some of its products and services virtually to clients.
Technology companies have largely benefited from remote working trends brought on by Covid-19 but the company says this mostly benefited the consumer side of Telkom's business, especially in the first three months of the lockdown. With large portions of companies working from home, demand from enterprise clients — BCX’s bread and butter — waned.
BCX, which contributed half of Telkom’s R43bn revenue for the year to March 2020, may be well placed to still take advantage of the working-from-home trend to provide new enterprise services such as conferencing tools, as a new revenue stream.
Adaptation is the name of the game after all.
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