We all want to be our own boss and take charge of how long we put into work. Today’s business landscape requires companies to be very direct to be successful, focused to attract customers and build their business to stand out.

I have never believed that one company can do everything, the quality of a business is usually measured in the services that are rolled out over a long period. The IT industry in Nigeria is still emerging with so many tech companies especially in Lagos playing the lead in adopting and rendering technological services. A company must focus on her strength. Information technology is so broad you can’t do everything in-house and succeed, doing so will need you to employ all the best brains out there and that’s really not possible because A ‘Business Ecosystem’ is a network of organizations — including suppliers, distributors, customers, competitors, government agencies and so on — involved in the delivery of a specific product or service through both competition and cooperation. My word here is cooperation, sometimes you need to partner with other firms to deliver services, and nobody ever said you don’t deserve commissions or benefits. Staying focused on what you can do and building up based on your core competence is very important in a business ecosystem, especially in a field as broad as information technology.

My wife is a fashion designer and I find it very soothing that she does her business involving the cooperation of other fellow designers. The cooperation again is my point and so far I see her blossoming everyday, learning new things from others, helping to complete a business of another fellow and vice versa. Looping through the fashion industry in Nigeria, I can see how successful it has become, there is certainly competition but the cooperation is leading them to great achievements. Furthermore, today’s changing landscape of business involves integrating with its immediate surroundings. Who is doing what? How is it been done? Is there a standard? Looking for possibilities of transformation, and being one with the economic facet, while remaining true to the core of the business. This is what we need in the IT industry, more cooperation and partnerships that will make us build and leave behind a better Nigeria.

Tech companies like Interswitch have been in business for over a decade, as big giants in the IT industry, I give them all the credit especially for the good work they have been doing. Being a tech giant in a much untapped landscape requires you building bridges, encouraging start-ups, fostering partnerships with small firms and lending them a helping hand. A giant is not only a winner because they have been able to stabilise their business, a giant is one who has been able to support others to grow in an untapped industry. This is an aspect I strongly believe Interswitch has failed to manage in their so many years of existence. Looping through the companies in the United States, you realise there was Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, PayPal, then came Facebook, Twitter, and the others. Most important is how these companies created an ecosystem that still allowed up comers to be very relevant. Going back to Interswitch, I don’t know if they still ask businesses to pay a setup fee of 150,000 naira before they are connected to use their API. This is the craziest thing a company ever did, what happened to the idea of connecting every businesses to their platform and encouraging businesses to grow? Trust me if Interswitch had come up right from start to say we are going to help others by opening up our API for free integration and then make money from commissions, they certainly will be the best today, because of this close approach and having developers pay 150,000 naira to use their API, their growth truly has been limited. Remember I said growth is not only a measure of how successful one is, but also how well you have contributed to an ecosystem, when you consider that sometimes a free API can get a modification, a makeup that helps the company to move forward and even achieve more. I and my team have worked with Remita for over a year so far and we have made contributions and suggestions that can move that platform forward, we have integrated into the core of the system, developing libraries for frameworks that other developers can seamlessly connect Remita without even thinking, even the bible tells us there is great love in sharing and sharing does not mean letting out business secrets or strategies.

I strongly believe that we all love the new Microsoft, yes Microsoft had made so much in times past, contributing so much to the founder’s wealth, but the Microsoft we have today is far better. Giving credit to Satya Nadella for building Microsoft to become more open and more accommodating, their edging towards being as open as Facebook. When companies encourage openness, they empower their communities to do great things. Microsoft’s new mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, they can’t possibly achieve that without an open trend, for example Microsoft open sourcing SQL server is a big step in the right direction for them, taking away licenses and start up fees from SQL server allows them sell their cloud services. It is now a breeze to setup a windows or Linux VM with SQL server pre-loaded within minutes on the cloud and I tell you, so many are loving these moves and have keyed in already.

I can go on and on explaining the approach of tech giants outside Nigeria, their focus on what they do and how they can help others do even better, their strategies in collaborations rather than in competitions. New emerging companies have a focus, for example Konga is setting a pace in ecommerce in Nigeria and Africa, they have placed so much emphasis on helping other shops sell their products, in doing so they are growing every day, they have made a strong statement by fostering collaborations to move ecommerce to another level in Nigeria. I have even seen most of their engineers giving a detailed approach of their adoption of emerging technologies, others can learn by just reading up those articles. There are so many other companies doing great things in Nigeria by even collaborating more, this should be the ideology of every start-up or business, just like Agile tells us to place so much emphasis on collaborations. If there is anything like coordination within competition, unity in diversity, pushing for partnerships that recognize the strength and the potentials of the market, companies can maximize profit while providing efficient and reliable services.

I will guide you into how Nugi has been able to practice what I am preaching. In delivering our services, we strive to focus on the core competence of the company which is to develop unique and intuitive software products. We have chosen education and health to be our key areas of focus and we are pioneering innovations to help improve health and educational systems in Nigeria and in Africa. Other areas we have been able to build systems for are transportation and taxation. In all our software products, 90 percent usually require payments and SMS integrations. For those two required plugins, we have consistently used Ozioma (www.ozioma.net), a bulk SMS platform developed by Chibex Technologies and recently we have plugged all our payments via Remita (www.remita.net), a solution provided by Systems Specs. I believe that using Ozioma helps them to grow and stay in the business of bulk messaging, leading them also into innovating new and better Bulk SMS systems. Choosing Remita was quite easy because they built a platform that had an open approach, encouraged developer integration and allowed developers so much flexibility and power, they are building a strong ecosystem. Naturally Nugi will love to own payment and SMS platform just to keep control on the cost and make more money, but is Nugi looking at a broader cost of investing time in developing a payment and SMS platform? We definitely will fail because those are not our strong competencies. To focus on what we can do and be very good at doing it, we will continue building up partners who have invested time in not only research but thousands of hours in development. Nugi released Cloudskul (www.cloudskul.com), a web and mobile application that seeks to help growing schools, we made it with so much love and we made it free so that more schools can connect technology without thinking of breaking their bank accounts.

Recently I noticed that many banks in Nigeria had abandoned the verve card, issuing Master-card and Visa to their customers. What really happened to the verve? Further on that, the Federal Government preferred implementing the TSA (Treasury Single Account) with Remita and made them the only gateway to the TSA implementation, again what really happened to Interswitch? I believe that they should have been preferred over Remita because of their vast experience in the switching business. How Interswitch got here is what I have said in the beginning, how many companies did they integrate and encourage? How was their conduct when new payment systems emerged? Did they see them as threat and fight them? Maybe! How many collaborations did they pursue? If they had done all the above and integrated growing companies, I am sure the story will be different today, aside losing the Federal Government, many State Governments have also ported out, it’s like the scales have fallen off their eyes and they all can see again. What has Remita done that is different? I am not referring to their technology, their competence or how good their platform is, I mean how they knew that Nigeria had a payment problem and their willingness to genuinely offer solutions through a more collaborative approach. What did they do?

1. They developed a powerful and secured API and offered it entirely free.
2. They considered that developers will like to send instructions to split on a real time basis and they made that happen.
3. Their easy integration is another big point, from when you make the decision to use their platform to when you have completely integrated into them, you don’t contact a Remita representative until you decide to go live.
4. Remita integrated so many payment aggregators and partners and launched an agent programme which will employ thousands of youths across the country, how can such a business not work? When their main focus is on building the ecosystem.
5. As a tech giant, they believe that people down the ecosystem hold the key to tomorrow’s technological solutions and advancement and they have dedicated so much time to access such people and partner with them on new solutions.

Remita isn’t a complete solution yet, but they are getting there through collaborations, they are getting there by learning from those who work directly with most of the clients. With an open culture, they are able to receive suggestions and improvements on a daily basis.

If you come first, do your best to take others with you.

We can see a lot of progress with tech companies that have adopted collaborations rather than competition round the world. The most powerful force ever known in our existence is human cooperation whether in building or in destruction, can we build a strong ecosystem in our IT industry? My answer is a big yes, only if we all focus on our strengths, collaborating with each other, sharing ideas and helping emerging start-ups. My mathematics teacher once told me that we are measured by the impact we make, not in the winning or titles. Today I understand that if you are given an opportunity to lead, lead with collaborations. If you come first, do your best to take others with you. By developing our own unique strengths and talents and focusing on cooperation instead of competition, we keep the ecology of the IT industry in Nigeria diverse and healthy. There’s no need for anyone to claim a generalized top position. We have to work together to make the system function, taking a leap from the companies who taught us technology, we must embrace an open system and work towards building bridges and integrations that will help us leave a better IT industry behind.

The most powerful force ever known in our existence is human cooperation whether in building or in destruction, can we build a strong ecosystem in our IT industry? My answer is a big yes, only if we all focus on our strengths, collaborating with each other, sharing ideas and helping emerging start-ups.