By Victor Adar
For Dr Gilbert Saggia, the time is always right to do what is right. An ardent ICT expert, he tells a story of how businesses can bet on big data to flourish in a tough market environment where many players are vying for a piece of the pie.
Giving a presentation during Oracle Cloud Day at a Nairobi hotel (Villa Rosa Kempinski Hotel in Nairobi) on a cool Thursday, he says cloud computing is lighting up businesses especially young ventures. On this day, moving to the cloud was instant and easy. All you needed was a smartphone, a tablet or a laptop.
Saggia touched on three of their services collection including Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). He believes that cloud computing is a very beautiful thing changing not only the way we work but also the way we think about business. “You have to adapt faster than your competition,” he says.
“No longer do I need to have a big IT expert, a big desk, and a big data training centre to be able to be innovative as a company, or as an SME. As we know most SMES do not even have IT department. Sometimes even the Managing Director is the IT person, sometimes the receptionist is the IT person, and sometimes one of the people who at least know something are the ones fixing computers around.”
It is a scenario that truly limits how technology is going to be accessed; a situation where one person handles two departments is not healthy at all and could cut short life of a promising venture. Calling it “digital disruption” strategy, saggia says big data is what both big and small players must tap into to grow revenues as market opportunities are huge.
An entrepreneur is able to go on the web and literally shop for all these innovation and put something together. Internet of things sounds like a bit of a fad these days. But it is right here with us to stay. Painting a glowing picture of security companies – we have a lot of them in Kenya today – the Oracle managing director asks the, “how do we differentiate ourselves?”
“A security firm could say, wait a minute, ours is a security firm powered by the Internet. Every home that I am securing I’ll put a small device costing almost nothing. Or, costing $10, $15 which most of us can afford, we can afford a Sh1000 device. And when anybody opens that door, when anything crosses over there it is sent over the Internet to my control centre.”
Cloud management deal is key to a venture’s future. You might think that the guy has a big control centre, when all in the mix is a laptop. When all in the lab is an ipad. A small firm that literally was like everybody else can at a very small investment, and with a small idea about what will happen, with no expertise at all, suddenly be leapfrogging and becoming a major business. And if they can manage that for Kenya, what stops them from doing the same thing across the entire African continent.
“That’s what the power of cloud can do and put in the hands of small firms to make them grow big without having to have the kind of investment that traditionally was only known for large organisations that have got so much financial muscle; have got the much needed resources, and time on their hands. Anybody on cloud can make their companies compete and be on the top,” says Saggia.
Broadly all these things are what excites the witty director; focused most on “what we can do with SMEs.” Cloud is where business is, he says, adding that small companies that have employed two or three people and are figuring out how they can change the way they do their business can embrace cloud computing bit time to boost revenues.
As cloud services rolls out to the small enterprises, and corporates alike, Oracle uses public and private cloud computing options to deliver. After all, if you can access data from anywhere, that is a pretty good thing. Even when your computer crashed, cloud still has you covered. You cannot keep your data there and end up in shame – when you have enterprise data at a single place (and on the cloud in that matter)
It is a solution that lowers cost in the sense that it allows firms to capture a mix of data, and internalise the same data with the aim of placing a venture on a good path. What is captured could range from consumer complaints and reactions that spill from social media to company reports such as financial reports, as well as new industry trends aimed at providing insights to business leaders thus the ability to make critical decisions on accurate data is met.
Talk of the integration of social media, Smartphone, data analytics and cloud. The tide is changing so much that when consumer-focused trends like these are ignored then it means you are digging your own bottomless grave a time when in Africa 34% of people uses social media to discover a new product when it hits the market. Ignore big data at your own peril.
“Cost is variable. It is negligible compared with what any business is doing today. The percentage is almost something that you can’t even speak about. Everything depends on what someone wants to do. But if you compare with what it would take you when done on premise, you own everything, you run it whether customers come in or not, what used to happen in the older days, you will spend a lot – we’ve been consuming IT in that manner – but this one (Oracle Cloud) you pay as you go, buy only what you use. If you want to fly from here to Dubai, you don’t have to buy the plane, you just need an air ticket,” he points out.
Gilbert the man…
He has spent over 15 years in the ICT Industry in various capacities both in technical and sales leadership. Before joining Oracle in 2013, he was the Regional Manager for Cisco Systems responsible for the East African operation since 2007. Prior to Cisco, he held various regional management positions at Siemens.
Dr Saggia holds a degree in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Nairobi, a Masters MBA Certification from Tulane University USA, and other strategic leadership and business qualifications. He is a member of various regional and international ICT forums, and writes in regional periodicals and books particularly around “ICT in Healthcare”. He recently was listed in the top 40 under 40 Men in Kenya.
