‘We currently serve 74% of the commercial banks in Nigeria and top companies’

Melanie Ayoola, executive director, sales and marketing, Tranter IT in this interview with BusinessDay’s Frank Eleanya explains the company’s position in providing IT support for corporate organisations across Nigeria and some of the collaborations it is using to deepen its presence in the IT segment.

Tranter IT has been in the IT support service space in Nigeria much longer than any company, tell us what has kept you going?

Widely reputed as one of the longest thriving IT companies in Nigeria, the Tranter Brand was established in 1990. Our story is written by hundreds of people who have contributed to the growth of our company for more than two decades. People build relationships. Relationships build a reputation and our reputation precedes us.

Our focus has always been to enhance the businesses of our clients. To do this, we used our combined management experience of over 120 years which empowers us to innovate at every level. We are problem solvers. Rising to every IT challenge keeps our clients’ satisfied. We do not underestimate the power of added value.

Tranter IT Infrastructure Services Limited was founded in 2004 and has grown to have staff strength of over 300 wonderful people among who over 250 are IT-Engineers.

We have developed recruitment and training process that is second to none. It takes our support engineers through a tried and tested regime. We grow talents for excellent customer service. We instil a sheer determination to meet the client’s goals. The success of the client’s business is the number one goal of every support staff. At the end of the day, that is what support is. According to the 2019 Deloitte’s AI Survey, when it comes to talent in the tech sector, one thing is certain: the “shelf life” of skills is getting shorter and shorter. As a result, retraining has become crucial: companies should invest more in educating and training workforces for the digital era.

“A bridge cannot stand if the support system is weak.”

Over the years, we have been providing support to enterprise clients and recently to SMEs through the 10+ IT Support. We assist organizations in reducing the time and cost associated with managing their IT environments.

The need for enterprise organizations to grow based on the demand of an economy that is growing exponentially, we have had a constant demand to continue supporting especially the financial industry, manufacturing, oil and gas and others. If there is downtime, a crisis in their infrastructure at some point, they have a team who has the required experience to diagnose, pinpoint and rectify from Helpdesk Support, to POS and E-channel Support, Regional Support, Application Support and so on.

With the introduction of artificial intelligence, our solutions and support engineers have evolved our time to provide industry-standard required for supporting the end-user by on machine learning and analysis and also having their human touch to understand the user and issue.

This is a continuously evolving process.

 

How have your services evolved over the years?

The only thing constant is change. Almost every week, a new solution is created because a difficulty has been identified and proved viable. End-users prefer to have access to information on their infrastructure on the go and be on top of every situation. For this, we provide cloud-based solutions and more recently, solutions with artificial intelligence integrated.

Companies are currently undergoing digital transformation intending to attain seamless business operations. Now it has become more pertinent for a business to have their applications and infrastructure interact in a unified flow. As a company that has been in IT for over 15 years, we’ve had to ensure that the OEMs we partner with and the solutions we are bringing to the market are suitable to meet these needs whether they are enterprise or SMEs. Every organization, no matter the size, recognizes that IT is critical to high business performance.

For instance, in line of security, our products like SafeXS allows you to store and encrypt your data on a flash drive/hard drive. This was a big factor in the recent partnership as organizations aim to reduce their vulnerabilities. Better safe than sorry. Close up all loopholes as cyberattacks are becoming more frequent and more expensive to manage.

As I quote Funke Amobi of Stanbic IBTC, Data is the new water, it cannot be stressed how important it is to facilitate the easy movement and protection of data.

 

In terms of support and collaboration with the rest of industry, what is happening, bearing in mind that many businesses are still trying to get a hang of what digitalisation means to their bottom-line?

 We organise seminars for both end users and resellers with our OEMs to increase the awareness of the products and solutions we provide and understanding of how to integrate them to achieve digital transformation.

Digital transformation does not happen overnight. According to Gartner, Digitalization means turning interactions, communications, business functions and business models into (more) digital ones. This spans across the whole organisation.

Tranter IT is collaborating with corporate power houses who are currently leading the digital transformation in the country to increase the reach of digital approaches to business.

Nowadays, you need to respond to issues and clients quickly, communicate with different departments at the same time. Digitalization helps us to optimize business processes to enable us work faster using digital tools such as the mobile devices, social collaboration and unified communication platforms.

Our Zoho SME solutions are focused on the Digitization of Today’s Workplace from accounting, social media management, HR processes, to sending mails and so on.

Our enterprise solutions are focused more on enabling Digital Transformation of their infrastructures.

All year round, we are continually looking for affordable solutions that will add value to our clients, providing our clients access to latest technology from applications with artificial intelligence, machine learning and others. Today businesses want solutions that can solve more than one problem while driving down operational cost per return on investment which now includes internal and external customer satisfaction.

 

One of your most notable partnerships is the sole-distributorship of ManageEngine. Tells us how that came about and what has been the milestones achieved?

Tranter IT partners with top OEMs around the world. In 2013, Tranter IT became ManageEngine’s sole distributor in Nigeria. As a company driven by innovation, we consistently source and develop solutions to help small, medium and large-sized organizations utilize IT to achieve their business goals.

We currently serve 74% of the commercial banks in Nigeria and top companies across the manufacturing, insurance, government, oil and gas and logistics industries. To our clients and partners, we are a technology partner performing IT Infrastructure Management and Optimization, Business Automation, Outsourced Technology Management and Support Services.

ManageEngine is a successful product and affordable option when compared to the alternatives in the market. It has a great deal of support both from the OEM and the Tranter IT team in Nigeria. We offer local support across Nigeria for all our products and solutions.

Since 2015, we started off with a series of seminars and the attendance increase as the demand for product demonstrations grew. We now offer onsite support personnel for the ManageEngine solution. The expansion of our ManageEngine team is another milestone for us. We are able to accommodate more industries and more sectors.

 

What other expansion plans do you have and how are they likely to impact your operations going forward?

We plan on expanding our reseller’s network across Nigeria for all our OEMs specifically for ManageEngine. We are currently receiving numerous requests for the reseller program with Tranter IT on our new products. We are also expanding our IT Support Engineer program to accommodate requests from clients.

As technology trends change, we are continuously looking out for OEMs that would accommodate the change in the market. We are also investing in Internet of Things (IoT) and we will be providing IoT from homes, offices, warehouses, and so on.

 

What makes your company attractive for IT talents?

Tranter IT is attractive to IT talents because of the importance we give to Employee Value Proposition (EVP) which means we ensure it’s a partnership where our employees are rewarded and given unique benefits based on their performances. Maintaining a strong EVP which is integrated into all aspects of our business at Tranter IT, is what attracts and also helps us retain the best talents in the IT industry. In addition to this, the strength of our EVP lies in the great leaders we have who are supportive, inspirational and focused on development of talents.

 

You have a talent grooming program, what is the criteria for selection and process of grooming?

Tranter IT’s criteria for selection of talents involves testing of skills that when harnessed and developed, will reward our organisation in the future. Our talent grooming program is one that has been developed to carefully identify our future leaders through careful skills and behavioural matching analysis.

Because we know the success of our company is directly linked to our ability to attract and retain the very best talents, a combination of our coaching, mentoring and learning plan helps to support and guide our talents through their development processes.

Our personal development plan (PDP) is designed to make sure our talents are on track to deliver great results in whatever position they currently hold. This is ensured by continuous assessment and measurement of our talents to ensure they are on track in attaining the competencies required for them to be future leaders.