By Pascal Oparada
By thinking big, starting small and leveraging on existing technology, small businesses in Nigeria can push the frontiers of development in the country and meet up with the ongoing technology revolution sweeping across the globe.
This is the view of Ope Olaniran, Business Executive Director for Microsoft Cloud in Nigeria, at the ongoing TechFest 2018. He was one of the panelists at the event.
He said one of the bigger things is that small businesses need to access technology that would help them drive their businesses you can gather weather information. How is the weather in Jos and how has it been over three years and these are used to predict the yield of tomatoes or apples that are only grown there. You can decide what is the soil sample here and how has it been over time and how has that helped on yield.
He said It is important that tech companies make technology available to everybody and also make the knowledge of the application of that technology available to everyone.
“We just need to take that bold step as Nigerians that we will do this based on the cost constraints,” Olaniran said.
He said farmers can leverage on already existing technology to forecast weather and gather valuable information about best time to plant and have good yields based on existing technology available in the cloud provided by Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft Azure is an open, flexible and enterprise-grade cloud computing platform. It is a cloud computing service for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers.
“You can gather weather information. For instance, how is the weather in Jos and how has it been over three years and these are used to predict the yield of tomatoes or apples that are only grown there. You can decide what is the soil sample there and how has it been over time and how has that helped on yield,” Olaniran said.
According to him, the most important thing is that businesses can do that today as long as they have that platform and Microsoft provides that platform through Microsoft Azure. It doesn’t matter if it is open source.
He said small businesses need to have open minds about technology and approach them with any ideas they have. They should ask how they can leverage on existing technological structures to predict peak periods for their businesses.
“If you are a small business and you have an idea, make sure you are talking to a tech company. Ask the company about big data. Ask the person about your transaction information and use that to better your business.
“What are the peak periods when people are using my products? What is the peak period when people are coming into the store and how can I relate that to what’s happening in Nigeria?
“There is so much data out there and as a small business and the whole idea is you need to be able to just find it,” he said.
The availability of cloud technology existing for small businesses and the ideas people have should find a convergent point to drive growth for SMEs in Nigeria, Olaniran said.
