Bandwidth Barn enters multimillion rand partnership with Telkom

It is called the Bandwidth Barn after all.

One of South Africa’s top tech incubators Bandwidth Barn is announcing a three-year, multi-million rand partnership with one of the country’s largest telecommunications giant, Telkom.

Part of the Cape Innovation and Technology (CiTi) group of organisations, the Bandwidth Barn has a long association with Telkom, dating back to 2008 when Telkom became the headline sponsor of its inaugural incubator.

“One of our core strategic objectives is the fostering of inclusive innovation,” Ian Merrington, the CEO of CiTi, says. “This partnership with Telkom enables us to leverage and convert our historical enterprise development success into tech enabled innovation, incubation and acceleration goals which are aligned with Telkom’s innovation and enterprise development objectives. We are committed to taking our long and successful relationship with Telkom, to a new level”

Read more: Community-based Bandwidth Barn incubator comes to Khayelitsha

The partnership will focus on three areas that will help fast-track the development of new, innovative tech-driven products and services. Theses will boost Telkom’s customer-value offerings as well as the adoption of transformative tech by SMEs and large businesses.

These initiatives are as follows:

• The MediaTech Initiative will deliver market intelligence that will inform and seed business ideas with the potential to be further developed and commercialised.
• InnoTech is an accelerator programme for entrepreneurs focusing on software and mobile applications as well as serious games development.
• Acceleration Support Programme will assist high-impact black-owned SMMEs in the development, production and deployment phases of their businesses, receiving infrastructure, capacity building and mentoring support.

This comes at the same time Telkom announced that it’s made a R100-million commitment to its FutureMakers programme to help drive innovation in South Africa’s ICT sector. Apart from an SME fund, Telkom is also investing over R5-million in upgrading Johannesburg co-working and incubation space in Tshimologong Precinct, Braamfontein.

“We have the capacity, appetite, technical ability and leadership commitment to pursue high-impact projects and ideas with like-minded partners”, adds Ian Russell, Chief Procurement Officer of Telkom. “We are delighted to deepen our partnership with the Bandwidth Barn in the context of our FutureHub initiatives.”

Image via Real Estate Magazine