
Mr Segun Akano, Managing Director of Upperlink Limited has grown the Nigerian technology company to play in key sector of e-payment and has lately been among the registrants promoting the .ng, the Internet name for Nigeria.
In this exclusive interview with Kolade Akinola of Technology Times, Akano talks about managing Upperlink, industry segment market trends, policies and allied issues. Excerpt
TT: Who is Segun Akano?
Segun Akano: I am the Managing Director of Upperlink Limited. We are a firm of indigenous software developers and we started operations in 2003. We have been able to establish four main lines of business which are domain name, payment integration and collection with bank, software development as a whole for business automation, Google app for business and education. We partnered with Google to do that. As a matter of fact, we do what is obtainable anywhere in the world as far as software is concerned.
We are also blessed with a team of programmers that are brilliant and dedicated. We are proud that our products are of international standards making use of Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) standard which has just commenced and we have started the process of being accredited by CMMI. We are also starting International Organization for Standardisation (ISO) accreditation. These are things we have put in place to be competitive worldwide.
[su_quote cite=”Segun Akano, Managing Director of Upperlink Limited”]The Internet population is about 60% of active lines. However in terms of content, we have not achieved much. 70 million have access to the Internet, so what’s the output? That’s a big question. We sit on all foreign platforms like Facebook, Yahoo, Gmail and the likes, the question is how do we reverse the trend such that we diversify from all the foreign platforms. We need to expand our scope of generating content and engagement among the ecosystem of stakeholders. [/su_quote]
TT: Your company was recently accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). As a matter of fact, you are the only accredited ICANN registrant company in Nigeria. What does this mean for your service delivery?
Segun Akano: We are the 8th ICANN-accredited registrant in Africa and interestingly the first in Nigeria. Until we got accredited in July, there were only seven accredited registrants in Africa even though we have up to 1000 registrants worldwide and highly dominated by Europeans.
It is a big privilege that we have taken Nigeria to the world map and that’s our pride and joy. But it has come with a lot of obligations in terms of service delivery. ICANN has its own set of rules which they do not compromise. In fact, you can easily be de-accredited if you don’t follow the rules. This has really helped our business. It has made us to scale up to be more customer-focused.
If you have any complaint with your domain name, our staffs are always up to the task. “Customers are kings”; that rule stays here. We are also up 24 hours in a day which is part of the rule ICANN set for us. We treat our customers with honour and dignity. When all these things are put in place, we definitely get result.
TT: Aside being an ICANN registrant, you are also an accredited NIRA registrant company. What is your assessment of .ng (the Nigerian Internet name) uptake in Nigeria?
Segun Akano: .ng domain is on the rise. The body in charge of administering it is NIRA (Nigeria Internet Registration Association of Nigeria) and they are doing their best to create a lot of awareness among the populace. They have also created a lot of fora so that people can be sensitised. They are also engaging policies on the need to fashion out strategy to open up .ng. So, it is growing. We just need to give it its own time. You can’t force anything on anybody, you can only make it available in a friendly way and I think that’s what NIRA is doing.
We believe that in the next two years we will see millions of business in .ng domain in Nigeria because the bedrock for that service is bandwidth to be made cheap and available. The Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) is trying its best so that bandwidth is available to all the nooks and crannies of Nigeria.
Until bandwidth is cheap, people won’t be willing to come to .ng to register their business. We have a success story about this in the last three years because bandwidth is getting cheaper. We are looking at the time that bandwidth will be more affordable. We are also looking at over 17 million SMEs to register on the .ng domain in the next couple of years.
- Segun Akano, Managing Director of Upperlink Limited during the interview Photo credit: Kolade Akinola/Technology Times