Google, WordPress, Joomla for CMS summit

Open Source champions including Google, Mozilla, Joomla, WordPress, Typo3, Magento, Grav, and others are expected to grace the 2017 Content Management System (CMS) Africa Summit billed to hold in Abuja on March 3 and 4.

CMS Africa Summit is a premier open source technology event that brings together top ranking web developers, online retailer merchants, software engineers, web administrators, online marketers, online banking administrators, company owners, tech start-ups and incubation hubs, Open Source enthusiasts and tech students to a two-day conference.

An estimated 47 per cent of all websites on the Internet today run on a CMS and the rapid proliferation of ecommerce platforms in Nigeria is driven by the increased adoption of CMS platforms built for ecommerce.

Country representative for the CMS Africa Summit, Adedayo Adeniyi of Daydah Concepts, a software development company based in Abuja explained that the high cost of software purchase remains a problem for many small and medium scale companies in Africa’s emerging economies and inexpensive but Open Source solutions can hold the key to more meaningful and far-reaching adoption of technology for them.

The theme of this year’s event is “Empowering businesses through Open Source” and major focus will be on encouraging African start-ups to lean on Open Source as a strategy for growth and innovation ensuring that technology becomes an enable for better but less expensive business systems adopted by SMEs with attendant impact on the sector’s contributions to countries’ GDPs, productivity and employment.

Previous editions had held in Uganda (2016) and Kenya (2015) and this is the first time the event is being brought to West Africa. The audience will learn through 30 global speakers, Web & App Dev workshops, and Entrepreneurship tutorials on how to use Open Source technologies to sell or run enterprises in today’s world.

Open Source software is currently being leveraged on by developers across the globe not just for blogging and publishing but also for designing feature rich and secure internal process systems and enterprise resource tools.