Microsoft East Africa: Sebuh Haileleul Discusses Digital Transformation in the Region

Interview with Sebuh Haileleul, General Manager of Microsoft East Africa Ltd

What is your assessment of the sector? What are the latest trends?

From a technology perspective and a company perspective, there is a lot happening in Kenya, and subsequently in East Africa as well. I look after Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania for Microsoft. In the industry today, particularly in technology, we are seeing a lot of exciting innovation. Kenya is a country that is really at the forefront of digital transformation, not just in East Africa, but over the entire continent of Africa. After all, the mobile payment, M-PESA, was invented in this country. This is truly a mobile first country where many transactions are being done on a mobile platform. The second thing we are seeing is some exciting progress around customers and partners overall in terms of embracing digital, the Cloud in particular, and taking concrete steps to address cyber security, which is not only a threat for businesses and individuals here, but beyond Kenya and East Africa and across the globe as well. There is large number of the youth immersed in technology today on a day to day basis through social media platforms, mobile, and people building applications to try and address some really pressing challenges that are happening in Kenya which are applicable to many other countries in Africa. There are a lot of things to be excited and hopeful about in terms of what we see evolving over the next three to five years.

What is your competitive advantage? What do you bring to the market that is different?

When you live in a global world, it seems like everybody is really connected now. We want to continue to help our customers be successful in this digital transformation by helping them unpack what is relevant to the business at an immediate need and prepare them for the future.

Today, we live in a world where customers have many options from a technology provider perspective. Our focus has really been on how we can deliver the best value for the customer. How do we make sure that they are getting the most value out of the investment that they are making in our Cloud, our security, our technology, in modernizing their businesses? Second, over the last four to five years, we have also been really focused in terms of building alliances because no matter what part of the country, the continent, or the globe, you will hardly find a customer that is using only a Microsoft platform. There are flavors of different technology providers. We have been very intentional in terms of reaching out to other technology providers to build alliances. Collectively, if we come together, we can deliver better value to the customer. For example, we have a strong partnership with SAP which is a global company out of Germany who is doing a lot with customers in Enterprise. There is an SAP office in Kenya that covers Kenya and East Africa. We are working very closely globally with them as well. Adobe is also another company that has come together with both Microsoft and SAP to build an alliance to serve customers better. Very recently, we announced areas where we are going to collaborate with Oracle on the Cloud in connecting their Cloud platform with the Microsoft Cloud platform, Azure, as well. When we do these things, there will of course be areas where we will compete, but if we can find more synergies, areas where we bring our strength to the customer, to the government space, to the individual, we will do a lot more to help customers to see more value in their investment in technology and really help them to accelerate their digital transformation journey.

What is the process for driving the digital transformation?

This is something that we are quite passionate about. When we look at the continent of Africa, with over one billion people, the median age is 19 years old, and there is an opportunity to really empower and enable people to build the right skill sets for the 21st century, to help address the employability issue, create more opportunity, sustainability, and participate in the socio-economic development of African countries. One of the many things we have done and will continue to do is to work very intentionally with universities. We have a great partnership with Strathmore and we are working with JKUAT. We want to work more with public sector universities, particularly in the next twelve months, and move forward to address how we can help to provide them with access to technology, building 21st century skill sets, and how we can potentially support them in finding jobs locally in the ecosystem. The second part is also on the customer side. We are stepping forward in investing from our side by helping them with scaling, progression, and how quickly technology evolves. One of the consistent pieces of feedback we get from customers is that we need to help make sure the staff are up to par and have the latest skill sets in technology, which we continue to do. The third point is to continue to work with our partners. At Microsoft, we are a partner-led company. We are investing a lot in bringing our partners to our facility, bringing the right resources, spending time with them, doing workshops and hands on training and labs so that when they go to serve customers in the country and the region, they have the necessary skill sets. This is something that we will also continue to invest in. Today, one of the challenges is that finding deep subject matter expertise, particularly on Cloud computing. That is something that we want to help turn around. We believe that will not only benefit Microsoft, but also companies who are overseas who want to invest in the region. For many companies, no matter what industry they are in, if they can find readily skilled and available people in the country, that will be one of the key pillars they look at in terms of investing in that country. At Microsoft, one way we are addressing this issue is through programs like Cloud Society – a one-stop learning platform that helps you boost your cloud skills with a range of free courses. There is a domino effect in terms of helping to serve customers, better job opportunities, empowering people, participating in the socio-economic development, and attracting foreign investors.

What do you bring to the market in terms of cyber security?

Cyber security has become more and more of a top issue for a lot of senior executives, CEOs of companies, and senior government leaders. Unlike seven to nine years ago, it is really prevalent today. In Microsoft, we remain very focused. One of the offers we have is around Microsoft 365 where we help customers with a later operating system on Windows 10, on their devices and tablets, and help with the communication and collaboration around Office 365 which has a host of features and capabilities that we bring to customers in terms of how teams and organizations work together. Our Enterprise Mobility + Security is our security platform which covers end to end from applications, devices, and the machines that customers are using. It is really centered around identity management. We have a framework centered around Identity. Protect. Detect. Respond – which is typically customized based on organizations’ unique risk posture (e.g., variance in threats, vulnerabilities, and risk tolerances, and how they implement the practices in the Framework). Organizations can determine activities that are important to critical service delivery and can prioritize investments to maximize the impact of each dollar spent. Ultimately, the Framework is aimed at reducing and better managing cybersecurity risk. The last piece is reinforcing all of it with training. It is not just about the technology, it is making sure that we are transferring the skill sets so that once customers have implemented the latest and greatest on security, they are able to continue to manage it. This is very important for us as an organization because that is the way we will create sustainability and upscale resources, not from Microsoft just providing the technology and not supporting customers and partners. That is also another area that we are investing in. We also have great partnership with the government, specifically the ICT Authority. We have done a lot of work in training and upscaling, particularly in cyber security. We are getting ready to move to the next phase of that. We want to do more in helping them address that as well as helping them to scale their resources. If we continue on this journey, it has the benefit of serving a lot of audiences and stakeholders across the country.

Regarding artificial intelligence, what are you bringing to the market?

First and foremost, we initiated the conversation by sharing insights on the AI through a book titled The Future Computed: Artificial Intelligence and its role in society. The book provides a perspective on where AI technology is going and the new societal issues it has raised. Secondly, we are trying to ensure that we are using artificial intelligence to help organizations and governments really address pressing problems across the world, from climate to agriculture to healthcare, and even in the private sector for commercial customers. Some of the use cases we see are customers asking us to help them automate some of the daily or frequently asked questions that they get from customers. We can use artificial intelligence and take those resources and make sure that we are putting them on more strategic projects where we can get more value. In the agriculture sector, we are partnered with many organizations. We want to serve farmers better in providing interactive information where they can check on weather patterns, seasonality, what crops to plant. How do we enable that on both smartphones and feature phones, because most farmers are using feature phones? Our differentiated proposal is that we have really been at the forefront in terms of preaching and teaching and showing customers the responsibility that comes with AI. Today, something that many people have concerns around are whether they will lose their jobs. Will they be replaced by artificial intelligence and robots, etc.? The most we can do is to train our technology to make sure that it is actually empowering, it is actually contributing to socio-economic development versus being used for something harmful. Our product development and our engineering team are working tirelessly to make sure that we do that and, at the same time, use it to serve the greater good. We have a program called “AI for Good” addressed in the book mentioned earlier on where we support startup companies in particular in using artificial intelligence for addressing issues like water shortage, energy, etc. that can benefit other people.

Do you believe in Blockchain?

We are in the early days of Blockchain. There are a lot of different opinions. It has a lot of promise and it has the capability to be able to address quite a lot of different challenges that we see in terms of ledger and recordkeeping, but it is still very early to say that it will solve certain problems. There are some defined use cases but I am one of those people who needs to see the evolution and the progress of the technology.

What are you doing to drive awareness of the Cloud service?

I see some great progress and really great transformation, not necessarily speaking from a Microsoft commercial perspective, but our customers and partners really embracing the Cloud and what it is helping them unlock in terms of value to their customers and users internally, whomever they are serving. For us, our strategy is really a hybrid one. Today, if you take a step back and look at a lot of the more established organizations, over a long period of time, they have invested quite significantly on their own infrastructure, building data centers, hardware and software they have acquired, and for them, this is going to be a journey. That journey is happening right now. Most customers are on Office 365 from email, collaboration, document sharing, auditing. They have really embraced that from a Cloud perspective. We are seeing more and more organizations wanting to take their infrastructure and start moving it to the Cloud because they will get more capability and agility and they will have greater extension. For a lot of the well-established organizations who have been in business for a decade or more, this is a journey they are on and we are walking it with them and we are excited to be a partner for them in their Cloud transformation. For small and medium enterprises and startups in the country, most of them are really born on the Cloud. Many startups that are coming up in the country such as M-KOPA, who is in the energy business, built their business model around Optics and the Cloud and they are seeing tremendous value in their ability to provide services instantly versus other customers who have spent a lot of time building that infrastructure. If we continue on this journey, there will be a lot of benefit that our customers will get out of embracing the Cloud. We are complementing that again with training, knowledge transfer, and helping them skill up their people because as they move more of their applications and their data to the Cloud, we want to make sure that they are very well equipped to manage it. At the end of the day, we do not manage their data, we do not look at their information, it is all under the control of our customers and we want to make sure that they have the right skills to manage that environment on a day to day basis. So far, I am excited with what I am seeing in our customer space, in the startup ecosystem, also the transformation that our partners are going through where traditionally they were doing business on premises but they are embracing the Cloud now and stepping up to really serve our customers.

What is your vision for the next three years, in the medium term? What do you want to achieve?

In the next two to three years, firstly, we want to continue to partner with the government in the digital transformation so that they are able to provide services and continue to improve in that area. We want to make sure that we continue to build on that partnership. We are very focused on two of the big four presidential agendas, specifically agriculture and healthcare. We believe we can add value from a technology perspective. We want to support the president and the government so that at the end of two to four years, we can take a step back and all of us can be proud to say that we participated, we contributed, and we added value to these points. The second part is really helping our customers as they digitize their business. Today, this is at the forefront for many customers. There are many disruptors that are coming at them every day, be it locally or companies based in other parts of the world. When you live in a global world, it seems like everybody is really connected now. We want to continue to help our customers be successful in this digital transformation by helping them unpack what is relevant to the business at an immediate need and prepare them for the future. Thirdly, we want to be able to take a step back and say that we made a significant difference in helping the youth, our customers building 21st century skill sets so that they are relevant and they can continue to stay on top of the latest technology and help address the employability issue. In May, we were the first company that set up an African engineering development center here in Kenya and Nigeria. We will invest about 100 million dollars between Kenya and Nigeria in building this center. This is fantastic for creating jobs for the youth. Since May, we have been very busy recruiting a lot of software engineers and we will continue to do that. We estimate over 100 people over the next year will be hired. Our team is very focused on recruiting and onboarding those software engineers. Three years from now, we want to be able to say that we have one of the best development centers for Microsoft globally here in Kenya and Nigeria. If we can do that, it will open up a lot of companies that are based outside Kenya in the more developed markets to look at Africa very differently. They will see that there are skill sets, passion, and that people are very eager and committed to learn. If they invest in these countries, they will find the right skill sets and their businesses will also thrive. If we can achieve that, I will feel very good about our accomplishments.

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