Nigerian ICT provider dominates market with Nutanix

Rasheed Adegoke, CEO at Algorism.

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Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in private, hybrid and multicloud computing, announced today that Nigerian systems integrator and IT specialist Algorism has been leading the local market as one of the biggest suppliers of technology solutions to businesses within the financial services, real estate, healthcare, government and utility sectors. As the first Cloud Champion Nutanix partner in the country, Nutanix has been an integral part of this success.

Based in Lagos, Algorism is a two-sided organisation with an enterprise business focused on delivering world-class digital transformation solutions to enterprises and governments across Africa, and a platform business focused on building software platforms that solve ecosystems’ problems in critical social sectors.

"Our goal is to help customers turn digital transformation projects into a strategic business advantage," said Rasheed Adegoke, CEO at Algorism. “It is this very ethos that led us to partner with Nutanix because infrastructure plays such an important role in the success of any digital project. We spend a lot of time educating our clients on how unsustainable old three-tier architectures are, especially because they require a literal forklift upgrade every three years. Hyperconvergence is the best fit for any transformation efforts right from the infrastructure to the app.”

Taking a chance on hyperconvergence has served Algorism well. It has all but sewn up the local financial services industry with no less than six of the most innovative banks and financial institutions in West Africa as its customers. This also includes a major industry regulator and CSCS, the Nigerian central securities clearing system.

“Nutanix is a strategic part of our business as it aligns well with Algorism's strategy to offer unique solutions that truly connect with our customers' vision for growth and innovation. Today it makes up between 60% and 70% of our business and is growing daily.”

Adegoke attributes this to the speed at which Algorism can deploy and scale Nutanix. While other solutions are at the mercy of long sales cycles, it can rapidly deploy a new infrastructure using hyperconvergence as the premise of digital infrastructure. This has proved invaluable for the Algorism team when working with newly licensed banks and new digital-centric businesses that do not have years, but rather weeks and months, to get a business up and running.

"We work exceptionally closely with Nutanix and our local distributors in terms of securing technology and deploying it. Most importantly to our customers, we can meet their timelines and show cost savings and a return on investment almost immediately. For example, one of the banks we worked with started just before COVID, and in just 10 months, they broke even. Not just because they had an exceptional business model but also because they were smart about their technology investments,” said Adegoke.

One of the key elements behind the company’s success is that it works hand in glove with customers to map out solutions that make a real impact and scale according to their requirements.

"Most customers want a technology that supports zero downtime, is simple to deploy and manage, and do not want to be held to ransom by unattainable specialist skills required to keep the lights on. Because of its simplicity, we do not have to throw our very high-end skills at a Nutanix implementation constantly,” said Adegoke.

It is a case of skilling up any technical resource while letting its specialists focus on innovating in the business. Algorism has already invested significantly in training its Nutanix resources. It plans to expand its team with additional resources over the coming year as it seeks to become the premier support house for Nutanix in the region. This will extend to offering professional services to its customers and the local channel.

With digital transformation now being top of mind for all businesses in Nigeria, Adegoke anticipates growth in areas that range from analytics and open banking to cyber security and the modernisation of all systems that support customer service.

“We are in an exciting but competitive market. Our goal at Algorism is to continue to seek out technologies like Nutanix that allow us to lead innovation and that will make sure we do not become dinosaurs in this ecosystem,” said Adegoke.

Rowen Grierson, Sales Director at Nutanix Sub-Saharan Africa, said: "As a global organisation, we rely on the expertise of our local partners like Algorism to provide customers with a smooth transition to a hyperconverged environment. Algorism is the perfect example of how successful the Nutanix Elevate partner programme is through the bringing together of our worldwide ecosystem with the unflinching commitment to disrupt the Nigerian market in a positive way to help customers achieve business transformation through the multicloud.”