Leading ICT solutions provider in Kenya: Sevenseas Technologies

Mike Macharia, CEO of Sevenseas Technologies, a leading provider of ICT solutions in Kenya, discusses the company and the ICT market in Kenya.

What are your key professional advantages? What do you offer as a company at Sevenseas? Where are you in this market that you describe? What are the areas where you are strong?

We traditionally stared out as a technology infrastructure company and moved into technology applications. Today we are in our 16th year. But as we became more mature, multiple things changed. For the last five years, we’ve transformed our organization towards one key deliverable. But anything we do in technology has got to have significant impact in transforming our communities and changing lives.

So anything we choose to do has to apply to those fundamental principles. And when we transformed our business towards this journey and our vision, it became very apparent that there were several sectors that could make significant impact. The first sector we looked at was healthcare. In healthcare for instance, if you look at some of the projects we are doing, we realized that our competitive advantage sits in aggregating global players that offer technology platforms or technology components. Whether it is radiology infrastructure, labs or oncology infrastructure, those global players need to localize their capability. And where those platforms meet technology, ICT, that is where our niche is. Most of these global players are not as agile as you could possibly be in our marketplace. So co-innovation with them in the marketplace plays a very significant role to be able to deploy some of this global project, both this national or African based projects. We’ve had successes in this.

We have helped the Kenyan government, with the likes of General Electric, to take the lead in transforming a large portion of secondary delivery hospitals. We’ve been able to transform a major delivery life cycle. And also capability delivery across a country of 45 million people, delivery of 100 hospitals, delivery of high level quality care across a country. When we indict that with the likes of other diagnostics companies not only in the area of oncology, but at the same time we also use this opportunity to leapfrog areas of EMR, electronic medical records, we are leapfrogging areas of teleradiology. We’re also making a difference in areas of innovation. With that, we’ve also launched a national, a Kenya based with an idea of becoming Africa based, health accelerator. We’ve also realized that some health innovations have got to come from industry practitioners that have been there for ages, but they never have had an opportunity to be able to have a platform to think about their idea. We also looked at scale up SMEs or startups that have been unable to scale up to the next level through trying to solve critical problems in healthcare. So we’ve taken healthcare in multiple areas.

Horizontally we’ve looked at technology components or what I call heavy lifting technology. Vertically, we looked at technology in terms of ICT. And in the Z-axis we’ve looked at innovation. So we turn to play those three XYZ dimensions to be able to see where we can have a competitive advantage. And it’s working for us. We see our human resources grow. The kind of capabilities and teams we have within the organization has grown. Our revenues have also grown as a result. So these are things that we have seen that have transformed our business. There are five things we believe will change African healthcare. One is we’ve managed to solve our healthcare human resource issue. That’s a big opportunity for us also. Second, look at technology models or digital models that can transform healthcare. That is also going to be a critical health care delivery opportunity.

Next there is the issue of PPP’s, public-private partnerships. We also team up with governments to help them solve problems. The next area is critical or looking for innovative financial models. Can we create innovative financial models? The next opportunity is the area of supply chains. The level of inefficiency in our healthcare supply chains is ridiculous in Africa. Can we solve those problems? Can Africa solve the human resource problems? Could we solve some of the supply-chain challenges? Could we find critical ways or very interesting ways to solve delivery of healthcare? These are all different opportunities for us. That’s why our vision to transform and change communities using healthcare is a valued one.