EaaS attracts rising demands

Andela, other players cash in on trend

AS MANY CORPORATE AND GOVERN MENT organisations daily make peace with the realities of remote working culture, what majority refers to as work-from-home, the demand for services that can support the new normal is also rising....

AS MANY CORPO RATE AND GOV ERNMENT organisations daily make peace with the realities of remote working culture, what majority refers to as work-from-home, the demand for services that can support the new normal is also rising.

Findings show that Engineering-as-a-Service (EaaS) players are particularly attracting patronage as organisations now see opportunity in sustaining remote working model as viable even postpandemic, giving efficiency, low costing and convenience, among others as reason.

For instance, due to lockdown and social distance protocols, some of stock brokerage firms in the Nigerian capital market that have been working from home without glitches are now querying the rationale for paying huge sums to lease offices in the first place, according to Business A.M.’s findings.

As the trend continues, players in the EaaS market are smiling, all the way to the bank, rendering services to a growing number of companies that daily find reasons to digitize their operations, depending on various softwares and ICT solutions.

This was further underscored last week as Andela, Nigeria’s leading EaaS player announced plan to extend its footprint to all the 52 African countries from which it will be accepting applications from engineers, going forward.

This followed an unpalatable narration in May, when the company resorted to salary cut and pay-off to keep afloat of the economic headwind, an exercise that rendered hundreds of its employed engineers redundant.

Jeremy Johnson, Adela’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said then, that while their customer base has held up better than most, the majority have still been impacted by the economic downturn.

“Andela expects to see churn spike this year as well as a decline in new customers due to the economic uncertainty. Expectations for slow growth necessitate cost cutting measures to ensure that we make it to the other side,” Johnson said at the time.

However, the new demand for engineering-as-a service, which is the core of the Nigerian tech innovation start-up, has continued to double as many more companies live the reality of remote working model.

Andela is now populating its technical staff base to meet new demand, a source within the company told Business A.M.

The management of Andela also corroborated this by saying that the extension of its tentacles to other African countries is in a bid to double its global talent pool and connect an even greater number of specialised engineers with opportunities.

The company further said it is now accepting pan-African applications for senior engineers with in-demand stack experience such as Node, React, Python and Ruby.

Andela helps its customers, who include Cloudflare, Wellio, ViacomCBS, and Women Who Code, gain access to high-quality software engineers who work as long-term, embedded team members.

“Today’s news will further enable companies that work with Andela to source the talent they need, when they need it, by opening up to additional talent pools across the continent with an even greater diversity of experiences and technology stacks,” it said in a statement.

“Over the past five years, we have become experts at identifying engineering excellence from non-traditional backgrounds. We know that there are extremely talented engineers across Africa and we believe that opportunity should not be limited by proximity to a major tech hub,” Johnson said.

According to him, being a remote-first engineering organisation allows Andela to open up access to the company for engineers across the continent.

“By removing restrictions on location, we will double our pool of potential talent to roughly 500,000 engineers in Africa who can now leverage Andela to work with top international engineering teams.

“Ultimately, our goal is to break down the barriers that prevent talent and opportunity from connecting by providing an easier, more efficient way for companies to scale global engineering teams,” he added.

Launched in 2014, and prior to being a fully remote organization, Andela operated in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda.

Today, Andela has successfully completed the transition to full-remote, which began with pilots in Ghana in 2018 and Egypt in 2019.

Accepting engineers from outside the capital cities in these countries allowed Andela to select and work with a broader range of top tier technical talent, with no reduction in productivity.

The company will continue to maintain its rigorous application process, in order to build the strongest talent pool of software engineers on the continent, Johnson said.

In the US, high growth companies continue to need more senior engineering talent, and in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, are increasingly open to hiring remote, according to him.

He also said that the world is beginning to realize that remote work is going to be a major catalyst for the democratisation of opportunity.

“Luckily, engineering leaders already know that remote work works if you have the right processes and systems in place, and are at the forefront of this change. By doubling our talent pool, we’re proud to help accelerate their critical work of building the future.” In addition to enabling experienced engineers to build global careers, Andela continues to invest in the Andela Learning Community, a programme that has introduced over 100,000 learners from across the continent to software engineering.