Mr. Uchenna Igwebuike is the Chief Executive Officer, Zanibal On-Demand Solutions, an indigenous software development company. In this interview with SIMON EJEMBI, he discusses the state of the Nigerian software industry and how it compares to others
How will you rate the adoption of new business solutions and software by Nigerian organisations?
The adoption, on a scale of one to 10, I will rate it an eight because a lot of them are starting to realise that if they are going to continue to succeed in what they do and move their businesses into the next generation, they need to take advantage of the revolution in the technology space that is happening all over the world with things like mobility, which is providing access to their services and their products on mobile devices; and also lowering their cost of operations. So, if they are really going to scale up their businesses without continuing to add head count, they will need to use technology to automate things that are manual, increase efficiency and reduce errors at the same time thus providing clients with efficient ways of continuing to access those services from the comfort of their living rooms.
How does Nigeria compare to countries like India in terms of technological advancement and software development?
The indigenous software industry is obviously not where India, Bulgaria and all these other ICT destinations are, but it is growing. It is growing because of a number of reasons; the first one being that like everything with software development, the closer the software vendor is to the market where these products are used, the easier and faster they can interface with the end users to really understand what the opportunities and specific needs are and to make sure that the software addresses the peculiarities of the operating environment in which these businesses find themselves. Secondly, as the cost of technology continues to go down, the solutions that were not affordable a couple of years ago are becoming more and more affordable now.
Having said that, there are obviously some structural challenges that we witness in the industry, things like skill set. If you look at the educational system in India, it is ahead of ours in terms of producing well-trained software engineers that can go into the industry and immediately contribute to its output. These are some of the challenges that we are seeing, but we are investing in after-school training programmes. We have a trainee engineering programme where we bring in really smart kids from the schools in Nigeria and teach them what they need to know to help us develop some of these solutions. So, the industry is not where it needs to be but it is definitely on the right track.
As a software developer, what is Zanibal looking to change in the Nigeria software industry?
The first thing for us is educating the market about the benefits of some of these things we do. Secondly, we will like to see a little bit more participation from government agencies that can actually tackle some of the bigger issues that we as software firms cannot solve alone. A good example will be the quality of infrastructure such as broadband access. Most of our solutions require really good cost effective broadband access to be available to businesses as well as to the consumers on their mobile and other devices. If you look at Nigeria today and you compare the cost of bandwidth, we are still more expensive than countries like India and the Western world in terms of the cost of purchasing reliable bandwidth. This is an area where we will like to see the government, in collaboration with the telecommunication firms, work towards lowering cost and extending Internet connectivity to almost everybody, whether they are in the remote or country locations or in the city. That makes it a lot easier for them to access the services and products the businesses have to offer.
Do you think that indigenous software companies are capable of meeting local demand and competing with their foreign counterparts?
Absolutely! In terms of the products that are being created locally, I will say that they are very comparable to a lot of these products that people can buy overseas. One of the things about the software industry really is that it is an industry driven primarily by people creating intellectual property. So, it is service oriented; you don’t need a lot of infrastructure in terms of machines and manufacturing lines. You just need to be able to analyse problems and sit down and write software codes that solve these problems. So, in the local markets; for example in the capital market that we play in, what we do here is very comparable to what obtains in other parts of the world. I mean if I were to go into my background, I spent the last 15 to 20 years in Silicon Valley and I have worked with a range of international companies and seen what is best practice all over the world, and I continue to work with these individuals and developing solutions that are used out there. So, when I come back and I see what we do locally in the country, I can tell you that there is actually no difference in terms of quality and capability.
How are indigenous firms tackling piracy, which has become a global problem?
The issue of piracy is an interesting one in the sense that increasingly, the model through which software is being distributed in this day and age is different from what it used to be 10 years ago. Most of the software we offer today are delivered through what we call software as a service; where you literally just open your browser, connect to a website and you can actually start to use those tools. So, a lot of the software that are being sold in this market are moving away from the traditional model of selling someone a CD, which they install on their computer and can pass the software around without having to pay the vendor. So, the new model reduces the issue of piracy significantly. Also, a lot of the consumers in the enterprise space are beginning to realise the importance of getting support from the vendor. They realise that by trying to save money here are there, they may end up with bad software; and if the software is not working, they cannot service their clients effectively. So, people are beginning to realise that these things add value to them and they need to pay the vendor in order to use it and get support for the products.
Are Nigerian organisations capable of properly deploying these software and business solutions?
There are still some challenges with the knowledge gap. There are concerns about how effectively those that acquire these things can use them; but increasingly, software vendors are starting to realise that they need to reduce the total cost of ownership for the client to actually use the technology. And one of the innovative things we do is that these days, we offer completely managed services, where we sell you not just the software, but the entire solution as a service – meaning that we take responsibility for deploying it, managing it, backing it up and ensuring that it always runs. That way, we achieve economies of scale by providing these services to a lot of people and lowering the cost, and at the same time, the client gets the benefit of not having to go out there and looking for skilled IT experts that will manage it for them.
There have been complaints that the focus of the industry has been on producing software for big companies to the detriment of small and medium-sized firms. How true is this?
I think that paradigm is shifting. For example, by the end of this year, we hope to have 60 per cent of our revenue come from the mid-markets, which is the SMEs. What we are doing is that we are moving our business away from doing large ticket transactions to doing a lot of small transactions that are geared towards the mid-markets. That is the sustainable part of the economy if you put it all in perspective. In any economy, over 60 per cent of the jobs as well as activities in the economy happen within the SME segment. So, we are trying to find a way to make sure that we can sell them solutions that are cost-effective; and at the same time, we as a firm can diversify our revenue base. So, for us we are recognising the need to move away from the tier one banks, the telcos and the oil and gas firms.
Why chose the ICT industry over others?
I have an engineering background. After studying engineering, I travelled overseas and I went to Stanford University where I majored in technology and business. And in the process of starting out my career in management consulting, I realised that for you to really create sustainable competitive advantage in firms, they need to take best practices in management and put them into technology because technology guarantees you that there is consistency in measuring and managing processes in an organisation. That is really what got me into the technology space and also, because the world has moved away from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy.