A New Dawn at Level39

As we get set to move into our new home at Level39 in the iconic One Canada Square building at Canary Wharf, I look back at the last two years and reflect on our journey as a technology startup with a focus on enabling the cost effective delivery of services with cloud computing. Having spent most of my career working for IBM, one of the world's largest technology companies, it stands to reason that the startup world was unfamiliar territory. Even now, I sometimes find myself thinking as an executive within a  fortune 100 company as opposed to a startup founder searching for a scalable business model. That said, my experiences leading IBM's African expansion program and developing the company's Africa strategy has given me a deeper insight, appreciation and confidence in pursuing the cloud opportunities on the continent.

A few months ago, I reached out to a good friend, Mukom Tamon, a professional committed to building technical capacity across Africa. I had called to inform him of our recently signed 5 year partnership with the Zimbabwe Academic and Research Network to transform their business from simply connecting schools to the Internet, to delivering accessible and cost effective educational services using a cloud computing business model. Mukon referred me to How to Build a Startup on Udemy, a program every entrepreneur should make time for. The insights and snippets of wisdom served to validate some of the things we had been doing correctly, albeit without realizing why, as well as what we needed to fix. It reaffirmed the need for us to keep searching for the right scalable business model, pivoting until we find it.

At Level39, we join a community of over 513 members, about half focused on the UK, and the other half also serving clients outside of the UK.  We are in good company, given that 72% focus of members are focused on the delivery of financial services. This presents an opportunity for us to generate additional value for our financial services clients across Africa, many of who are seeking to access innovative services that can be cost effectively delivered via a cloud business model and made accessible from basic mobile devices. I recommend taking time to read the L39 report on their accomplishments over the last 2 years.

As a managed cloud services provider, Tech Equity plays the role of enabling service providers across a range of sectors to offer cloud services to their clients, without the overhead of sourcing infrastructure and software, and the expense and burden of talent development and management of scarcely utilized skills. A majority of our clients are existing service providers seeking to re-invent their businesses by embracing and delivering emerging cloud services cost effectively and with minimal risk. We follow a number of simple steps to enable our partners to take the cloud proposition to their customers in a timely and cost effective manner. This requires us to make significant up front investment in developing and negotiating partnerships with third-party suppliers, while taking into account the unique needs and constraints of our partners. Our ultimate goal is to find answers to the following questions:

• How can we enable our service provider partners to innovate faster with cloud?
• What is the incremental business value of moving to and offering  cloud services?
• Which business areas and application workloads should the service provider focus on?
• What is the monetary value of  our investment in standardizing and automating cloud services deployment and management business processes?
• How ready is the service provider  to move to a cloud business model?
• What incremental revenue can they expect by moving to cloud?
• How can our investment in developing enterprise cloud certification programs enable the partner to acquire the level of knowledge and understanding needed to enhance their profile as a thought leader and cloud innovator?

Within the last 2 years, we have made tangible progress in articulating our value proposition. Our success has emerged from engaging with the business to understand business needs and priorities, as opposed to focusing on IT efficiency benefits. In our view, a strategic approach to cloud is not solely about technology. A cloud strategy should address process, services and people aspects as well. That is why our team is composed of experienced business and technology professionals with practical hands on experiences of successfully delivering projects around the world, as well as building and managing cross functional, multi-disciplinary teams.