Ekovolt

An enterprise technology services company empowering businesses online through affordable and reliable connectivity, with local cloud and work productivity solutions.

Organizations in the region today have challenges in deploying and migrating sensitive data to the cloud. Data sovereignty and foreign currency payment requirements for cloud hosting services forces organizations especially those hosting medical and financial records to host on premises. Additionally, IT administrators are challenged with having to manage infrastructure with constant interrupted power supply and keep up with network upgrades. We provide the capability of using PaaS (Platform as-a service) from major public cloud providers in our locales that we serve without having to worry about data traveling across borders or obtaining foreign currencies to pay one's bills. We introduce access to cloud services to businesses who will for the first time migrate from storing patient records on paper or spreadsheets to a cloud database.

We deploy a local hosting environment for cloud services using open-source and hybrid clouds providing a view of on-premise and off-premise resources in use at local data centers. Thus, enable businesses of all sizes new capabilities of self-provision, localized hosting and payments while acquiring virtual machines, storage, and backup services. In the future, our solution 'Arena' will bring in local access to major cloud platforms in sub-Saharan African markets. By creating extensions of these global public clouds (Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services) in the region we enable organizations to comply with data sovereignty regulations and host major public cloud-based applications on local infrastructure.

We offer the following advantages:
-Flexible and pay-per-use consumption model: Our pricing model attracts startups and small enterprises with limited budgets giving the flexibility to turn up service for shorter-periods.
-No forex required: we accept local payments for use of services, customers needing services shorter than a month are not forced to pay for a service longer than intended use.

Arena provides cloud services for organizations needing to host applications locally. Given new capabilities to acquire compute, virtual machines, storage and host databases we empower small businesses who otherwise look away from opportunities to apply new technologies that can improve business processes, these organizations become efficient as they evolve and identify in a digital economy. Our technology and advisory role with SMBs gives us limitless opportunities that introduces solutions to first time users. Our solutions for SMBs begins with office productivity, email and collaboration, we deploy and support Hosted Exchange and Microsoft Office 365.

Metrics:
- Customer growth - increase month-over-month growth from 10% to 25% in the connectivity and cloud services.
- Customer satisfaction - Achieve net promoter score (NPS) of +50.
- Customer retention - Reduce churn to from 7% to 1%.
Top Goals

- Convert 50% of Broadband Internet enterprise customers to paying users on our digital local hosting platform.
- Expand Broadband Internet services outside of Lagos State, Nigeria.
- Reduce vendor and supplier costs while maintaining internal costs

Our vision is to lead the African sub-continent in its digital transformation as Internet inclusion advocates. We lead in the revolution by making the Internet affordable for all and by transforming the way we work and live by applying modern cloud access solutions in the delivery of our basic human services – healthcare, education and public safety.

By providing affordable connectivity and cloud solutions, we empower our clients with access and inclusion to the digital economy.

We empower hospitals, schools, financial services, insurance firms, and public safety organizations who either buy cloud services that may be over-dimensioned for their needs or must be able to pay in foreign currency for flexible product use on public cloud portals. We offer customers flexible product use and payment in local currency. We have built local hyper-converged clouds that mirror the public cloud portal and overall user experience.

Arena delivers value by empowering local enterprises to achieve more with employees, partners, suppliers, and customers. We have witnessed growth in small businesses with our technology enabled solutions.
We have also worked with an Insurance Brokerage firm in Maryland, Lagos that now stores and accesses client claims, policy documents online. That has improved their business operations and interactions with prospects and clients by making information (quotes, policies etc.) accessible from any location and device; and improved overall productivity by 20%.

Emeka, co-founder and Director, Engineering spent 15 years at Verizon in Program Management in the US before moving back to Nigeria to start Ekovolt in 2015.

Austen, co-founder and Director, Business Development held senior positions at Deloitte and Cisco and joined the team on ground in 2017.

From our experience in the U.S. we integrated an online payment gateway enabling convenience for our connectivity customers, however we learned that was not common practice as customers preferred visits for check pickups. Local market demographics also present a challenge as affordability and priority are not placed on technology.

Our revenue generation model is based on a monthly recurring charge to access our connectivity or cloud solutions. We are on the cusp to breakeven in 6 months, we're a co-founders' funded organization with paying customers.
Our strategy is an adoption of prevalent cloud services with affordable connectivity designed for businesses. We offer these cloud products from local data centers and have built a Network Operations Centre at the Rack Centre, a Tier III, carrier neutral data center in Lagos, Nigeria. By collocating our core network infrastructure and interconnecting with connectivity providers we have a scalable platform to distribute network services. And, peering with the Internet Exchange Point Nigeria (IXPN) provides us the capability to offer unlimited data access to locally hosted content. The IXPN is scheduled to serve all West Africa in 2019. We currently serve private and public organizations, improving the way enterprises work, meeting everyday needs such as hosted ERP applications for hospitals, schools and micro-finance institutions to online backup of CCTV videos for public safety.

We currently have a cluster of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) servers used for networking and hosting services. Grant funds will be applied as follows:
- Increase footprint in local Tier III data centers, purchase additional power and Rackspace.
- Purchase and deploy servers and storage equipment.
- Arena front-end web development
- Increase Global IP capacity from 100Mbps to 150Mbps.
- Scale the team - Hire a Solution Architect, Enterprise Sales Consultant focused on (Cloud Services)
- Advertising and marketing.

-Competition: Cloud service providers and larger software aggregators can possibly do the same, though thye target a different market.

-Customers reluctance to new approach in IT: most organizations have invested huge CAPEX on equipment that houses their business applications and may have concerns retiring that and migrating to the cloud. Arena creates local hybrid clouds and we provide clear migration plans.

- Lack of infrastructure: w're dependent on the increase of Tier III and IV data centers regionally. To scale our services, we need more data centers that provide high-availability of at least 99.995%.