Collaborative Innovation towards a unified computing system among emerging tech firms in Kenya

Abstract

The idea for collaborative innovation within emerging tech firms especially in country of Kenya has not been fully explored. The subject of consideration is how do these emerging tech firms collaborate innovatively towards a unified computing environment where aspects of shared resources such as computing, storage, networking exists. Information technology is in a state of constant change. For example, computing has evolved from distributed computing to grid computing, to utility computing to cloud computing and now we have the new emerging unified computing environments. Thus, unified cloud computing is emerging as a new computational method and service. A dramatic proliferation of research has recently emerged concerning Unified cloud computing, but there exists a gap in terms of looking at collaborative innovations within emerging firms especially in Kenya towards innovations that are geared towards unified computing systems.  Increasingly more aspects of work and life are conducted online and the popularity of smart phones has resulted in using computing resources anywhere, or cloud computing utilization. Literature reviewed on global collaborative innovations towards unified computing environments have revealed existence of inadequate research done especially on emerging technology firms in African context. The study seeks to explore the architecture and framework of unified computing systems and explore some models of collaborative innovations that can be adopted among emerging tech firms towards developing a unified computing system (UCS). The study also compares this trend of collaboration especially among well renowned giant-tech firms such as Google, Cisco, Microsoft, and others on a global scale. This finding will therefore provide a framework to emerging tech firms in Kenya on how to collaborate innovatively towards coming up with an existing unified computing system that will enhance shared computing resources among them to provide Internet, software, computation, storage resources, networking and data access. Generally the UCS will enhance shared resources in three categories: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Related literature was reviewed and selected for consideration in the study.