The cloudy secret to scaling up
How did Intellipro’s eGranary get so big so fast? How can a company that has fewer than 10 full-time employees, and outsources its software development, reach tens of thousands of farmers?
Leonida Mutuku’s explanation is disarming in its simplicity:
“We run off a company called Node Africa, a Kenyan solutions provider, which means, firstly, that we are growing together.
“Secondly, because they are local, it means we have limited latency since we don’t have to bounce off a server in Ireland, and are keeping the money local.
“They also offer us managed services, so we don’t have to have a networking genius constantly looking at our networks.
“That means we can concentrate our efforts on analytics and putting applications into production.”
It is no coincidence that Node Africa is also a star in the Vmware world.
At the 2016 edition of VMworld, founder and CEO Phares Kariuki also participated in the keynote event, explaining how his company chose VMware and its vCloud Air Network programme to build its business and data centre.
Because he couldn’t afford the equipment needed for a data centre, he created a software-based version – known as a software-defined data centre.
Using a virtual network platform called NSX, from VMware, he was able to build a scaleable cloud infrastructure in six weeks.
Says Kariuki: “The amount of money we have saved on networking equipment as a result of using NSX as the basis of our network has been amazing.
“We saved a massive $10 000 on just our initial network. That’s a really big saving for a start-up.”
That benefit is leveraged, in turn, by Node Africa’s customers, like Intellipro.
“The biggest factor is that Node Africa made it so easy for us to deploy and scale up,” says Mutuku.
“They’ve very reliable.
“We have not had any downtime, and we’ve been with them for nine months.” been fantastic,