Nigerian technicians better than foreign counterparts — EMC boss

August 6, 2013 by STANLEY OPARA Leave a Comment

   

Fraijat
| credits: File copy

Nazim Fraijat is the Managing Director, EMC  (Levant and Emerging Africa). In this interview with STANLEY OPARA, he talks about the huge market for Information and Communications Technology solutions in Nigeria, among other issues

What exactly does your company contribute to the ICT sector?

EMC originally started as an infrastructure and storage company in the 90s. It actually started earlier than that, but the 90s heralded the milestone of turning EMC into one of the largest IT companies and the largest company in providing information and infrastructure protection and recovery. Since then, EMC has undergone major transformation in becoming the main player in driving cloud computing and Big Data. Today, EMC has about 65,000 employees, exists in more than 150 countries and has offices around the world. At the moment, we provide customers with two things: information protection and security as well as continuity. These have been our core business and will continue to be our core.

We are making huge investments in cloud computing and Big Data and that’s where we believe we will see the major transformation and we believe that EMC is in a very unique position to drive this transformation and I am not saying this because I have been with EMC for over 13 years.

You always need to re-evaluate the vision of the company and see if it is relevant to the future or if the company can invest in the future and this has been demonstrated over the years by the vision of the leadership of the company. An example is the major acquisitions that we have made over the past 10 years or particularly the acquisition of VMware. These acquisitions took place over seven years ago and today VMWare is the building block for driving Cloud Computing and Virtualisation.

You appear to have focussed on the Nigerian market. What exactly are your intentions for this market and, so far, what have been your major challenges?

There are a number of challenges but that’s why we are really excited about the investment in Nigeria and emerging countries. They are countries that have a huge potential and a huge need for the latest technologies. I’ll state here that a lot of the problems run outside our scope, I won’t say that EMC is going to solve the problem of Nigeria as a country. But we can ask the question: How does our foray into the Nigerian market translate to benefits to Nigeria, the economy and the people?

One, adoption of Cloud Computing. Today worldwide customers are telling us that they have huge IT operations and data cenres and they tell us they want to increase revenue but reduce cost. They are saying this because the evolution of IT in the past 20 years has resulted in a very complex IT environment; number of storage, servers, different vendors, different networks, different managers, different management, even the expertise is different, there is no continuity, you have to keep evolving.

There are disruptive technologies. Every time a new disruptive technology comes up, you end up on one of two scenarios, you are either prepared to adopt or integrate this disruptive technology or you end up re-investing all over again. Like when Internet came, it really revamped the way data centres and even banks were running.

You might ask how we are doing this in the Nigerian market, and in a number of other markets that have the same characteristics as this one. Well, we are partnering with service providers in order for them to make available their platform to offer IT services to enterprises and private sector companies and even governments so they don’t have to invest all over again. So, when we say platform-as-a-service, back-up-as-a-service, organizations do not need to build their  own platforms or back-up system. The service providers can provide them. If you look at the savings by these enterprises who subscribe to these services from service providers it’s huge. The other advantage is that you adopt these services much quicker because you are not enabling 3G or any other service.

The other area where we see ourselves relevant is in cost reduction, especially the cost of operation. When I look at how in Nigeria this is important, I think of the example of the dependency on electricity. We can reduce the electricity consumption of the same system dramatically by deploying technologies that require much less power. While in other parts of the world it’s because of the Green Technology Movement, and we can adopt this technology for those reasons here as well, however, it has the added advantage of being efficient in the scarcity of electricity. So, while we cannot fix the electricity problems in the country, we can help optimise electricity.

Nigeria is a growing market, will you say it will pay off your investment just as it did in the Asian countries or will it supersede your returns in Asia?

I can’t make that comparison because we will get into the dollar figures. I can however respond in terms of growth.  We earlier mentioned a growth figure of 40 per cent year on year in Nigeria. These are very strong figures.  Today we are talking about growth and even decline in most of Europe and America, but growth is seen in single digits in most of the world. When somebody is growing at 11 per cent or 12 per cent this is great .

However, it’s not only about the growth in the GDP of the country and economy. It’s how far the IT  adoption is, so for example if I have an economy that is growing by 10 per cent but they have a five per cent IT adoption rate, that means I have 80-90 per cent I can go after, but if I have high adoption and low growth then there will be no return. So we see this in the emerging market and we see return in Nigeria and West Africa and other parts of Africa where it is very strategic and important for EMC to grow.

What we have here in Nigeria is not a sales office alone. It is a sales, technical, customer support, implementation, project management office, the full cycle. And this full cycle is Nigerian. If you peek inside, you’ll can see that the management, the sales, the pre-sales, the implementation are all Nigerian. EMC is usually involved in mission-critical environment, we don’t provide consumer products, what we have are systems and where we stop, business stops. That’s a problem. You cannot continue protecting these customers by being remote.

Where are your big markets in West Africa?

The biggest is Nigeria but we are also present in Ghana.

Why did it take you a while before coming to Nigeria?

Actually, we have been here since 2008 and I don’t think that’s late. EMC does not provide every product in the world. Sometimes, we are not relevant or customers don’t need our technology. I’ll give you an example, everybody wanted and bought a printer 10 years ago or a laptop or even a server and we don’t make any of these.  We build infrastructure and when the demand in the market and in the customer requires that level of infrastructure then we are relevant. I can tell you, not just in Nigeria, so many other parts of the world, where there is relevance, EMC acts before anybody else. 10 years ago, I was in a lovely country talking about the disaster recovery, business continuity and data protection. After a couple of days talking with customers, I realised that they didn’t need our technology. They could live on anything else. I went again six months ago and I was asked the same question, why now? And I said to them that we started 10 years ago and it didn’t work because we were not needed.

Will EMC be adding any more organisation to its portfolio, or are there more acquisitions on the horizon for the brand?

I think the direction from the executive leadership of the company, and this is not a secret, is that EMC will continue investing in acquisitions to bring more services and deliver more value to our customers. Now the watchword of EMC acquisitions in the past and even going forward has always been focus. We have never made an acquisition that distracted the strategy of the company, and this happens in a lot of other organisations.

EMC invests about $2bn-$3bn annually, more than 10 per cent of our revenue, in Research and Development as well as focused acquisitions and as a result, it improves the value to our shareholders and makes a huge difference to our customers by giving them fully integrated solutions; end-to-end single management protections, recovery, cloud computing all of them integrated together by giving the single training environment, making their environment less complicated. One of the main successes for EMC is by being more relevant to our customers and the only way to do this is by listening to our customers.

This business requires specialised skills. Do you think Nigeria has the required brains to do your business?

100 per cent. It’s all run by Nigerians. We believe in local skills. I come from one of these countries; we rely on the local resources because at the end of the day we will need to put in local investment. They are amazing and I think they are even delivering better quality than a lot of managers and technical resources from abroad. I will give you an example; a Nigerian Technical Consultant won best Technical Consultant for EMEA region at the EMC Awards in Las Vegas in front of 15,000 people and one of our sales people in Lagos was one of the top sales men in the world out of 65,000 employees.