AOS Ltd.
Catalyzing A Digital Revolution In Rwanda

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have unfavourable effects on the world and African continent in general, from which the Republic of Rwanda is not spared. Amid this unprecedented health crisis, Rwanda is embracing digital transformation programs like other countries around the world to stay abreast of the existing as well as upcoming challenges. Interestingly, helping the country in this regard is Rwanda’s popular ICT company, AOS Ltd.

AOS’s mission is to transform Rwanda—and Africa—with sophisticated ICT solutions and services that offer unrivalled efficiency gains and enhanced business value realization to its primary clients and end-users. And to make it all happen effortlessly, AOS focuses on providing high-end cloud computing infrastructure to encourage private & public institutions and SMEs in their digital revolution while pushing the adoption of IoT technology in the Rwandan technology space simultaneously.

How it All Began

In 2007, the Government of Rwanda partnered with Korea Telecom, a leading global ICT service provider, to bring cutting-edge ICT technologies to the country. The early success of this partnership led both parties to collaborate even further and collectively achieve bigger goals like developing the Rwandan ICT sector, positioning Rwanda as the regional ICT hub in Africa, and fueling economic growth by delivering effective business services in Rwanda. Later, in 2014, the two parties set up a joint venture called AOS as a vehicle to implement these bigger goals.

Currently, AOS is a Rwandan-based ICT service provider and operator of the National Data Center of Rwanda, offering various hosting services, such as cloud computing, web and email hosting, server colocation, backup as a service, and disaster recovery facility to both the public and private sectors. AOS is thus committed to providing the best data center facility in the region. Besides, as AOS hosts the data locally, it offers the company’s clients a smooth uptime and faster loading time for even local browsers. This, in turn, allows these data to be easily searched and found on search engines like Google. Not just that! The local data hosting feature gives businesses peace of mind in terms of data privacy and management. The company’s specialized technical and experienced sales staffs ensure all data is secure and easily accessible to all the customers. AOS also provides IT solutions, systems integration, and IT consulting to both public and private institutions. “In essence, we are creating a synergistic technology ecosystem within the country with our three business lines, which are IDC (internet data center) operation, system engineering, and software development,” says Seong Woo Kim, CEO of AOS.

Drawing on these capabilities, AOS has so far successfully designed, developed, and executed various projects/systems, such as the public procurement system of Rwanda 'Umucyo', public CCTV project and ongoing Government smart administration System (GSAS)—a system collaboration tool that digitalizes Government of Rwanda’s internal administrative process for more efficiency and security, and improves service delivery between the Government of Rwanda and its citizens. Going a step forward, AOS has also provided superior IT support to simplify its daily operational activities.

In order to make such meticulous cloud services even more affordable, AOS has recently introduced various packages that are optimized according to localized demands. AOS clients can access these custom packages from the company’s online market portal. “And to make these packages even more economically viable for startups and SME clients, we are currently offering 50 percent discounts on cloud and up to 77 percent on webmail hosting services,” says Woo Kim.

In essence, we are creating a synergistic technology ecosystem within the country with our three business lines, which are IDC (internet data center) operation, system engineering, and software development

Moving ahead, AOS is also planning to focus on sustainable innovation and provision for empirical and affordable IT services. “Our goal is to let local and regional customers have access to IT and cloud services without hindrances in language, customer support/care, and high prices,” notes Kim. Alongside this, AOS is determined to expand its technical competencies through open-source innovation, exporting relevant skills and home-grown IT solutions into other countries across the region and being the regional vendor for IT equipment and putting up an IT academy where trainings can be offered with the aim of gaining expertise and abilities is also another plan of action we are looking into. This clearly shows that AOS is all set to customize its services even further without incurring high additional/recurring costs.

“Simply put, together with our local partners, we will continue designing, developing, managing, and pushing the Rwandan, and in turn, the larger African tech ecosystem, to the next stage,” concludes Kim.