Thank you

I am lucky enough to work with an amazing team whose minds are set on achieving greatness - corporate greatness, the kind of greatness that will never shine on their CV, or make a difference to the world, or even turn them into rockstars. That journey to greatness started four years ago with a project 2020, with its set lofty goals of what we needed to achieve. This piece is me on a virtual porch sitting on a rocking chair and sharing history.

The journey started in the middle of a telco where megabits ruled the roost, and routers ran the balance sheet. We knew for tomorrow to exist we had to do something different - as individuals, we had to burn our ships on the shore there was no going back. Different was pursuing a cloud goal where Africa's Cloud is Liquid. In hindsight, it seems obvious, but the journey was anything but. The cloud boat was cool and everyone wanted to jump on it, but no one was willing to row and we knew we had our work cut out. That work started with recruiting like-minded people who enjoyed going against the grain because attrition was the only way forward. The first step was out beyond our comfort zone, convincing Microsoft that we would be different to the Telco's that had come before us to sell the cloud and transform businesses on the continent. They believed us, and we had our first win, a Pan-African CSP.

The journey to successfully sell Microsoft cloud services entailed being constantly pitted against the business as usual bottom line feeding, well-understood products. We started simply. A few Microsoft Office 365 seats in one country, and then extended that across the continent. We dabbled in a little Azure becoming blue in the face (pun). And we were just getting started. Nothing that was done was understood, but luckily the business started to understand that there was something - not enough to bet the house, but something to keep fed and watered just in case. The food and the water were just enough to get us through today. We fought tooth, and nail against varying interests and misbeliefs. The idea was an orphan, but we knew it had to have a father, and we would be its father.

Today I look back at that period, call it rough formative years, and think how did we make it through. I look at the team and know it is because of them. Now your question may be what does looking back show, and did Africa's Cloud ever become Liquid? I postulate that we definitely did more than we imagined and did more than our customers know we do, and lastly we may have turned some detractors into proponents. To tell the meat of the story, and to say thank you I will pen our success as succinct bullet points.

• Just under 200,000 Office 365 seats sold directly by us, or one of our partners
• Just under $2 million in managed Azure deployments
• The largest Azure Stack deployment on the continent bringing world-class compute compliant with data residency laws
• 10 Microsoft Gold Competencies including - security, communications, cloud productivity, cloud platform, and others
• The most connected Microsoft Azure Peering Services (MAPS) partner in Africa, the only partner with peering set-up in South, and East Africa with West Africa coming online this year
• Delivered Microsoft's first ExpressRoute in Africa
• A partner marketplace servicing partners in over 15 countries
• Acquired a leading Dynamics partner
• Thousands of Teams Business Voice seats with calling plans in 6 countries

I could go on. The simple truth is the team has been impressive in what they have achieved, they believed where many gave up and chose different paths. And this list is just the start, we were learning and we were clumsy in all we did. Luckily we have gotten better, and this year we will be even better at helping our customers and partners on their cloud journeys. I did leave out one success point. During the journey, Liquid Telecom became Liquid Intelligent Technologies. The small team of men and women worked hard at delivering a dream, and that dream changed the name and the DNA of a company.

This year is going to be our coming-out party, to our customers be ready, to our partners we are going to change your world.

To the team, I say thank you.

Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan