Adeola Allison, business development executive for IBM West Africa carries the responsibility of pushing ecosystem development across the region. She recently spoke to AFKInsider in Lagos, Nigeria on IBM’s various programs for startups in Nigeria, Africa and other parts of the world through the IBM Smart Camp – an arm of IBM’s Global Entrepreneurship Program.
She also spoke on IBM’s Innovation Center that would soon be opened in Lagos to provide free support, mentoring and technologies to entrepreneurs in Nigeria.
AFKInsider: What is IBM trying to achieve with the IBM Smart Camp?
Allison: What we are bringing here is extremely unique, the Smart Camp is part of a global initiative but we are taking a very local perspective in seeking out local startups that have innovative solutions for local problems. But we don’t even stop there; we encourage them to think global as well.
While their solutions may be locally relevant, they should also have commercial viability not just locally but globally. The world is a lot flatter now with the advent of cloud, with the advent of the internet and with the advent of mobile; they don’t necessarily have to have physical offices across multiple locations in order for you to be able to do business outside where you are based.
An example of that is the IBM Innovation Center in Lagos. This is a space where IBM showcases its breadth of expertise with hardware, software, technology services, consultancy services, you can come here and you can have access to it for free.
AFKInsider: Besides the space, what are you providing?
Allison: Besides the space we are providing access to technology, there is a server room that has IBM’s high end computing power machines. We are providing access to our consulting services – we do have a consulting practice. We have engagement rooms where they can meet with IBM experts in private to discuss their ideas and get recommendations, feedbacks and mentoring – all for free.
We identified people in the local system who have a lot of expertise, it doesn’t necessarily has to be around technology, many of them are successful technopreneurs running technology startups, many of them are investment bankers who know what it means to be an attractive investment organization and can advise the startups to package themselves in such a way they will be attractive to investors. Some of them are from academia. We’ve done a lot of work to build an ecosystem of mentors.
My colleagues in IBM have a lot of expertise working with a lot of people in industries so together we formed this venture ecosystem and we make our resources and services available to the startups for free at no charge.
AFKInsider: What’s in it for IBM?
Allison: We are not a charity organization; I’m the business executive which means there is a business angle to what we are trying to do here. What’s in it for us is that it’s difficult for us to come in as IBM into Africa or Nigeria and be successful without partnering with the people who have the local indigenous knowledge. We don’t have that expertise. Partnering with the people who actually understand the local challenges and understand what it would take to solve them makes it easy for us to really be successful and establish our footprint in the market.
We can’t take our enterprise-based software that works for instance in mature market, pick up that same solution and throw it in the Nigerian market and expect it to work. We absolutely gain by engaging local partners.
We are sharing what we know and we are also learning from them.
AFKInsider: Do you have stakes in the startups’ businesses?
Allison: It depends. Generally we don’t own the business. The IBM Global Entrepreneur program has only been in existence for four years – Smart Camp is part of the global entrepreneur program. All of the businesses that we’ve made successful, we don’t actually own stakes in their business per se, but what we do require is that they use IBM technology. That’s what we know – we can’t teach them other people’s technology, that’s not our core competency.
Obviously we don’t expect them to use all of IBM technology or only IBM technology; but if we are going to add value to them, they need to be using what we can help them with.
AFKInsider: How competitive are Nigerian startups participating in IBM SmartCamp compared with those from other regions of the world?
Allison: To be completely honest, what I’ve found with the Nigerian startups is that many of them focus on just Nigeria as a market. When they are thinking of solving a problem, they should be thinking globally. We are a global company. One key criterion that the judges look for as they advance in the competition is global commercial viability. That is where I’m seeing a gap with the Nigerian startups. I don’t think before now they’ve really been challenged to build solutions not just for the Nigerian market but for Africa as a whole and the whole world. But let’s see how it goes.
In 2012, the winning startup at the global level was a startup from Kenya called Mobile Decisioning. They built their solution for the Kenyan market but with our mentoring support as well as the feedback we are getting from the mentors and network that we put together for them, they quickly changed their perspective and saw the commercial viability across the globe. And now they have operations not just in Kenya but other parts of Africa as well as in northern America.
All of these came as a result of partnering with IBM, engaging in this global entrepreneurial program through the smart camp competitions. At the end of the day, when they went through the competition phases, they won the global competition held in New York. There were over 200 venture capitalists in attendance. It helped them in terms of expanding their region of opportunities.
One of the key challenges they had before engaging IBM was they couldn’t get funding, not even from banks, but by the time they went through the process, they were mature to the point where even their local banks were coming back to them, begging them to partner with them and to do business with them because they really saw their potential at that point.
AFKInsider: At what stage would IBM like to engage startups?
Allison: We try to engage them as early as possible in the process. Usually the startups that have funding don’t need much help, that’s not our key target. The criterion for participation in the Global Entrepreneurial Program is that the startup has been in existence for 5 years or less. Usually if they are able to make it pass the 5-year mark they’ve usually gotten access to the kind of support that will make them successful, especially if they are technopreneurs.
AFKInsider: What of the cost of your solutions for startups that aren’t part of your initiatives, how expensive or affordable are they?
Allison: They are extremely affordable, especially with cloud. We have enterprise grade products. Traditionally we play in the enterprise space and target our solutions to the enterprise market but more and more, we have a strategic focus on cloud.
We deliver practically everything we sell to enterprise we also sell through the cloud on a subscription basis. Some software subscriptions for instance are as low as $10 per month and because it is on subscription basis, you can cancel at anytime with no penalty.
If you take our cloud computing software, Soft Layer, you can get your entire business operation going on the cloud at ridiculously low cost. All of a sudden you are running a cloud-based solution of enterprise grade software – not open source.
It is extremely affordable and more and more we have customers in the small and medium enterprise space taking advantage of our solutions in this market.
