Monday 23 March 2015BUSINESSDAY: www.businessdayonline.com

33tart-Up DIGESTS

Introduction:

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are largely seen as “engine of growth and devel-

opment for any economy” 1. This however has been a major challenge in Ni-geria due to many fac-tors ranging from limited capital, lack of competi-tive muscle against bigger counterparts, attitude to business risk, lack of ex-pert prowess to build a credible brand, high em-ployee turnover among others.

More than ever be-fore, this is the time when SMEs must rise to the occasion to be a profit-able channel and also yield expected benefits to the economy, which encompasses but are not limited to job creation at low capital cost, skills development (semi-skilled and skilled workers), and hotbed for entrepreneur-ial and managerial talents. Realistically looking at the pace of development in this sector, this goal still looks far-fetched and aspirational.

It has been observed that “the phenomenal growth of SMEs in Ni-geria is mainly due to the people’s quest to be self-employed and not be-cause it is easy to establish or manage” 2. The ques-tion here would be “why do people want to be self-employed?” Could it be back to the unavailability of jobs for our graduates? Or a fad? Or Nigerian entrepreneurial spirit? How can technology help alleviate some of these problems by increasing productivity, profitabil-ity and reduce risk? To this end, it has become the survival of the fittest as businesses struggle to make profit from their in-vestment in a very tough climate where there is no steady electricity (power to run the business), high cost of operations (mar-keting strategy, customer acquisition), high cost of IT infrastructure, high cost of services, lack of management skills, fi-nancial constraints due to inaccessibility of funds.

I would attempt to ad-dress the challenges above through a different per-spective from the tradi-tional writing, a view that redefines how SMEs plan, organise and run their

SME transformation is here: Microsoft Adaptive Platform…

Oluyomi Alarape

businesses today.It is largely reported

that “SMEs in Nigeria have not performed credibly well and they have not played the expected sig-nificant role in economic growth” 2. Beyond mere words, it is time for the SMEs to take their right-ful place in the socio-eco-nomic development of our country Nigeria by using adaptive technol-ogy based on Microsoft innovative platform to create a thriving business and enabling environ-ment amidst existing chal-lenges.

M i c ro s o f t A z u r e - Adaptive Technology for SMEs in Nigeria:

T h i s i s t h e M i c ro -soft Cloud Platform also k n own a s “ Mi cros oft Azure”5. It is an open and flexible cloud plat-form that enables you to quickly build, deploy, and manage solutions across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.

Adaptive technology in this context is the abil-ity of the platform to de-liver solutions at near speed of light, auto-scale as business grows without any manual interven-tion and at very afford-able cost where you pay for what you use, thus turning required capital expenditure (CAPEX) to operational expenditure (OPEX), at the same time frees up capital from in-frastructure investments. Its adaptive nature makes it possible for you to eas-ily write, run and use software on the platform. SMEs want to be able to enjoy the luxury of big enterprise (speed, scale, economics, integration, security, heterogeneity), assure stakeholders they have the technology that meets the highest regula-tory - compliance stan-dards including business continuity in case of disas-ter, and scalable modern websites and applications hosting starting from free, shared, basic and standard service tiers6.

M i c r o s o f t A z u r e - adaptive technology empowers SMEs in the following ways:

•Grow with limited capital: A number of SMEs do not get to break-even because of limited capital to run a business. There is often scarce budget for IT infrastructure and

marketing despite being very essential to business growth. You get the ben-efit to “do more with less” in the following ways:

a. Issues of Power and Electricity: This platform eliminates your depen-dence on PHCN to run your business. By this I mean, you no longer need to worry about buying servers to host any appli-cation locally, not to talk of the associated cost of cooling, rack and physi-cal space for the servers. The cost of generators and diesel can be taken off you completely as you automatically offload this responsibility to the most qualified service provider, which is Microsoft, which has over 15 years’ experi-ence running some of the largest cloud services in the world like Hotmail, Windows Up date and Bing. You get to ben-efit from all of Microsoft knowledge and global platform. When you are ready to scale, you scale on-demand with no up-front cost as you only pay for what you use.

b. Productivity-on-the-Go through global access to your business appli-cations: Through Azure RemoteApp Service, you can securely make avail-

able your core-business applications to your em-ployees, partners and po-tential customers across the globe at any time and on any device (Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android). The landmark here is the flexibility, integrated se-curity and centralised control and management of business data being created, accessed, updated and stored.

•Reduce cost of busi-ness and Impact of Em-ployee Turnover: Since SME operations are largely lean and heavily depen-dent on small workforce to be profitable, the as-sociated cost of turnover and re-training always leave a big blow on entre-preneurs. Another head-ache is the cost of secur-ing very skilled technical professionals which when found could be prohibitive and most SMEs wave this off. The good news is that you no longer need to deprive your business of the enablement IT brings, as you can leverage Mi-crosoft Azure to quickly realise the benefit of using technology to automate basic processes over the traditional ways of using human capital:

a. Human Res ource Cost for Maintaining the

Platform: The mundane tasks of up dating the server firmware, operat-ing system and service patches that you tradi-tionally have to employ someone to oversee can be completely offloaded to Microsoft. A lot of people are worried about how this offloading impacts lo-cal job creation. I see this from a different light, it is like the days of typewriter, and days we used to carry packs of floppy disks drives and CDROM. Those days are over, and we must use technology to our advan-tage as entrepreneurs, and nation at large. This trans-formation actually brings a new level of enablement that elevates human rel-evance to further oper-ate at advanced level of intelligence with tangible contribution and impact to economic development, an obvious gap today. As sys-tems get more intelligent, we will continue to see the shift up the quadrant, and people get more empow-ered to lead innovative transformation.

b. Your Expert Employ-ee (Machine Learning): Mi-crosoft adaptive technol-ogy provides computing systems that get smarter with experience. Experi-ence in the computing world is in the context of past data and human in-put, whereby the system is able to make custom predictive analysis. This is the game-changer for all businesses today - the ca-pability to consume gazil-lion of data and quickly determine why your busi-ness is not growing? Why are your best customers leaving as an example; and you are able to determine not only why they are leaving, but predictive analytics will also tell you the company and which ones are currently at risk based on past data. See my next article on this subject.

• G a i n C o m p e t i t i ve Strength and Earn Cred-ibility for Your Business: Most SMEs never realise their potentials because of competition from bigger enterprises. Their poten-tial is often not seen as enough to compete fa-vourably. The tide has changed through Micro-soft Azure. You now have the required resources, strong brand name con-sistent over the last 40 years, global reach, accred-ited platform that position

your business at the top. a. Realize Your Busi-

ness Potential: With Mi-crosoft Azure, you can count on your applica-tions and services, with a 99.95% monthly SLA, and automatic OS and service patching. You can focus on your core business and differentiate yourself by leveraging the Microsoft brand to accelerate your business growth. You im-mediately tap into dif-ferentiated services deliv-ered through Microsoft’s 19 highly regulated and accredited datacenters regions worldwide. You can pride your business 24 X 7 through Microsoft worldwide reachable and hyper scale adaptive plat-form that gives you better economics, business agil-ity, and availability.

b. Disaster Recovery for SMEs and Branch Offices: It is practically impossible for most SMEs to invest in disaster recovery site because of the prohibitive cost involved. Microsoft Azure provides affordable option for SMEs to imple-ment business continuity that showcases planned and unplanned recovery functionalities with the same capabilities enter-prise pays huge premium to achieve.

c. Meet Regulatory Cer-tification: SMEs can now boast of their business compliance to local and global strict industry regu-latory requirements rang-ing from health, financial reporting and security, Food and Drugs Adminis-tration’s requirements for electronic records. SMEs can easily show investors their level of compliance ranging from business continuity through Azure Backup and Site Recovery Services (ASR) to industry-specific attainments.

Among several others, Microsoft Azure is the first cloud computing platform to adopt the British Stan-dards Institutions ISO/IEC 27018 code of practice for the protection of Person-ally Identifiable Informa-tion (PII) which focuses on protecting customer pri-vacy customers and secu-rity of their data7, 8. “ISO 27001/27002, SSAE16, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC1/SOC2, UK G-Cloud, Food and Drug Administration 21 CFR, FIPS” 9 are some of the independently veri-fied industry standard on Azure.

Globally, SMEs are now taking advantage of this adaptive technology (Mi-crosoft Azure) and phe-nomenal results of up to 50% cost reduction by using this adaptive tech-nology10.

For further enquiries on Mi-crosoft Azure, send an email to dialogue@microsoft.com.