Emomentum Interactive Systems: Implementation of ICT Solutions in Kenya

Interview with Kagume Chiuri, Managing Director of Emomentum Interactive Systems

Please tell us about the IT sector itself. Where are you in the IT sector? How do you define yourself? What are the trends in the sector?

As at August 23, 2008, Kenya now had one national operator, two regional telecommunications operators, 51 Internet service providers, two Internet exchange points, 20 public data network operators, 8 Internet backbone gateway operators, 6 VSAT hub/commercial VSAT operators, 19 local loop operators and two mobile operators. Today, the number of players, not just in Kenya but in the region has significantly increased. The cost of broadband has also significantly reduced and our regulators have worked tirelessly to open up the airwaves in order to pave way for even bigger achievements in this area. This means that digital communication has become more efficient in terms of the internet speeds available and also in terms of the geographical reach within the country. Largely, the same kinds of investments in communications infrastructure are being made by several other countries within the East, Central and Southern African region. The implication of these large capital investments being made is that the cost of connectivity has significantly reduced whilst the availability has exponentially exploded, with many businesses and individuals who previously did not have access to digital communication coming on board. This has resulted in the creation of a previously non-existent digital market place. As a business, we foresaw the impact that these developments were going to bring and very early on made significant investments in the skills and digital solutions that would be required to fulfil the resultant need that would arise from the digital space, predominantly driven through cheaper and more efficient connections to the cloud. These solutions are designed to enable enterprises and individuals to transition from expensive on premise installations to cloud based configurations which lower the cost of ownership for both enterprises and individuals whilst facilitating very high business returns. The beauty about our solutions is that they cut across different industry segments and are applicable to enterprises of different sizes and levels of complexity. We now have a very large market across the region which is able to benefit from these cloud based business solutions. All one needs to do is research on the number of small and medium sized businesses in Africa, which would be the equivalent of a typical “Mom and Pop “shop in the western world to begin to appreciate the size of the total addressable market, and this is without taking into account the large businesses which are also at different stages of conceptualising and adopting digital strategies for leaner and more efficient operations. That said and done, the early adaptors have already taken the leap and gone digital. These early adopters have proved to work as proof of concepts to the rest of the enterprises that the digital transformation is here and here to stay. The trend is that today, every other enterprise is looking to benefit from the high returns accruing to participating in the digital technology space and we are seeing a lot of uptake in all our solutions across all industries in the region and this is very exciting.

You are not the only company to supply solutions like that. There are many other companies. How do you differentiate yourself? What makes you different? How generalized is the specific sector that you are in?

You are right to note that we are not the only company to supply solutions like these in the market, however, we were amongst the first companies to make conscious strategic decisions to take advantage of the new markets that would be created through the infrastructure investments being undertaken across the region. You will notice that many of the companies that were originally in this sector were actually in the provision of the infrastructure itself, whilst we are in the provision of solutions which are designed to be deployed over the infrastructure. In that sense, we have had a healthy head start, which has enabled us to be ahead of much of the competition. One big differentiator that we have relative to the other players in the market is that we have managed to retain the talent required to enable our customers to benefit from our solutions. We all come from specific backgrounds in business analysis, implementation of business systems and web development. We are able to put together the technical skills and business knowledge to rapidly deploy a mobility strategy both internally and for our customers. Of course add the generic advantage that we work and operate within our African environment which we understand relatively well. Into the future our advantage will be that we are able to package more activity based solutions or what we call niche solutions targeting specific sectors. Right now we are still dealing with the general solutions that are applicable across different industries such as Enterprise Resource Planning tools and the like. We are however designing very niche solutions targeting very specific use cases within specific industry sectors. For example we are doing research that would enable making the link between doctors, the examinations and diagnosis that they make on patients, the treatment they provide and at the same time being able to link this information to the drugs prescribed and diseases reported across geographical boundaries and this is just a part of the kind of work that we are doing. In a few months this research will yield more niche solutions that will address the core needs of the enterprises in the respective industries in very dynamic ways. We are also working very hard to get those niche solutions to a Pan African scale. We are advising enterprises to cannibalize their traditional spend on infrastructure and use that spend on more business related technology spend. So our biggest advantages are that we have first entry advantage and we combine skills to be able to roll out a mobility strategy together with business knowledge. We are able to deliver a digital strategy with immediate ROI because if you combine the technical and digital knowledge that we have and combine that with industry expertise you will find that we immediately deliver the ROI that the customer needs on the fly.

How international is your company? Do you only work for Kenyan companies?

There are 54 countries in Africa, with a population of 1.11 billion and growing. We see Africa as big. The opportunities in Africa are big.

We are very customer centric. Traditionally we have grown our customer base through word of mouth and we have been given very good referrals by many of our customers. We have been able to get installations in Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique as well.

Are these customers in different sectors and need different solutions? Or are they the same?

Most of our customers are in the financial services industry. That would be banking, investment banking and insurance. There is also a big chunk of them that are in manufacturing and then we have quite a few customers that are in professional services such as law firms, tours and travel, transport and airlines. We are also making inroads into the education and health sectors. As enterprises continue to start seeing the convenience of implementing good digitally enabled mobility strategies and start transforming their core systems, naturally we will be there to partner with them to seamlessly and painlessly navigate through their transformation leveraging on our experiences and expert knowledge. The transformation begins with people, management reports on the fly and then from there going into very specific line of business solutions and guiding the enterprises through the risk conversation.

Are you interested in investors for your company? Either in a light manner such as venture capitalists or deeper and really investing in the company?

We see this as a journey and the journey is determined by the opening up of the particular markets we want to address. We do this using the principles of cloud, big data, social and innovation. As more enterprises come on board and the geographic space increases we will require more capital and partners that can broaden the value that we are going to provide. There are 54 countries in Africa, with a population of 1.11 billion and growing. We see Africa as big. The opportunities in Africa are big. The countries in Africa are in different stages of the digital explosion but it’s happening really fast. It is foreseeable in the near future that we will have thousands of enterprises and individuals that are in the digital space and the technology service provider that would be able to get a big market share in that space naturally would require to have a broad spread in terms of its capital base and people that have invested in it. It is in our short term plans to increase our capital, maybe through some private placement arrangements and in the long term we do have a very clear strategy to be a fully listed technology services organization.

We would like to know about the core of your business, HR, human resources. You have a great team but IT and ICT are driven by the minds of people. How easy is it to attract those sorts of skills to a company in your sector?

It’s very fluid. Our attrition rate is high at the moment because right now we are very project based. For the generic solutions that we deploy we can attract and retain high levels of expertise internally because then we have the volume of customers that will allow us to retain the resources on-board more permanently. However, when it comes to the niche industry solutions that we provide, then HR becomes a challenge. Those kinds of skills are needed on demand. Right now we have a seemingly good partner in terms of skills base that we work with out of India, to beef up our internal capabilities when required. We also work very closely with the some of the Principle Software Vendors that we partner with in terms of bringing in specialized skills where required as well. That said, to attract the kind of skills that we need and retain to maintain leadership across the board is a challenge. The skills conversation is a topic that drives us to talk about our capital base because if you really want to be a top player in a particular industry and to be able to really have that strategic leadership place, the HR that is required comes at a premium. It is a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Do we hire the specialist before we get the project? It’s a balance that we play around with. We also noticed that the very good skills that we have in our environment in terms of line of business, typically someone who has been a specialist in a particular area for 18-25 years, may not be technology savvy. They don’t feel motivated to work for a technology company. They would rather join an industry specific management consultancy to address the management and operational issues of that industry. We are constantly thinking of how we can sustainably attract and retain that calibre of resources and keep them in our organization permanently.

Where do you see yourself in 3 to 5 years’ time? What would you like the company to achieve by then?

We want to be a company that is truly at the core of the value chain of enterprises in Africa across industry segments and driven by the new business models we will have designed because of the digital explosion. When we look at the way medical services will be delivered in the future, we foresee a whole new value chain between the doctor, the drugs and the patient and we see this value chain being digitally enabled, e-medicine. For a successful e-medicine platform to function, the entire value chain will have to be overhauled and possibly 70% of it will be delivered online. The way the doctor treats the patient, the way the drugs get to the patient and where the patient can be treated from. There is going to be a whole shift in terms of the way business is done to a new model. We want to be part and parcel of those new value chains and we don’t mean that it is only going to happen in the medical industry. It’s going to happen in every industry. The way we do our banking has already started to change. The way we buy insurance has already started changing. The way we buy groceries from the store has already started changing. All these different value chains are going to change and we want to see ourselves, as a company that will be at the core of that technological enhancement in the change of those value chains. The change is happening everywhere so you can expect our company’s footprint everywhere and we will be carrying the core of business. We will be a big solid new IBM type of company for Africa and beyond.