Kili: New service seeks to get companies to think local in cloud computing

By Lillian Kiarie

Kenya: Adam Nelson, a New Yorker, has found greener pastures in Kenya. The American moved to the country last year and has launched a service that allows organisations to use local cloud infrastructure to support their operations.

What is Kili all about?

Kili is a cloud infrastructure service that allows companies and organisations to deploy applications in Kenya. Right now, virtually all Internet applications used in Kenya are hosted either in Europe or the US.

But, it’s not just web and mobile apps that will benefit from this technology, but also banks and enterprises that need to design disaster recovery scenarios for their data or to deploy internal applications for their branch networks.

What inspired you to develop the service?

I founded the company based on my experience with cloud infrastructure in New York. When I first moved here a year ago, I saw very quickly that there weren’t any high-quality infrastructure service providers locally, and I knew that as more and more applications moved online, the demand for these services would only grow.

I grew up in New York and after college, I quickly became integrated into the New York technology scene and worked mostly on financial technology.

About four years ago, I got involved with a startup that did a lot of work via Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. I really felt that the days of buying your own servers or even using managed hosting were over. AWS solved that problem by allowing users to pay for servers by the hour.

What is your selling point with this service?

Cloud infrastructure as a service opened up a whole new world for technologists, and now even groups like America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Bank of America have cloud infrastructure supporting their operations. Many people tell me that cloud operations won’t work in their organisations, but if that’s true, the organisation will probably cease to exist — or the management team will be fired.

There are no organisations with an ICT infrastructure that can ignore the cloud anymore — doing so puts them at a severe disadvantage in the marketplace.

So your service will help companies save money.

Yes, companies can save money and get better performance for their internal and Internet-facing applications, so it’s not hard to convince users of the value proposition.

We’re also compatible with AWS and other cloud vendors’ abroad, so tech-savvy organisations can balance across clouds to avoid a vendor lock-in.

Clients can choose Kili and switch in the future if they don’t like our quality of service. We built this platform to make it easy for customers to leave — that’s the only way to gain long-term trust in a business-to-business relationship.

Have you received any funding?

We raised Sh9.32 million ($107,000) from investors in New York.

We didn’t have any funding at all for the first few months and productivity was certainly lower since I had to do consulting for other companies and dip into my savings to keep things afloat.

Still, because this is an infrastructure company, there is a need for capital to deploy Kili to the rest of the continent, which is our goal. We will be seeking financing later this year.

Have any companies taken up Kili?

We are about to launch the beta phase with 50 clients

Do you expect any revenue from this?

During the beta phase, the product is free.

However, the pricing model is very standard and the typical user will spend between Sh5,000 and Sh50,000 per month. There are also ways to use the system for as little as Sh1,000 a month, which is ideal for students and people who just want to experiment with cloud computing and operating systems.

I want to make sure we always make it easy for students to get on board and learn how to use this stuff.

What reception has the service received locally?

Developers and technologists are very excited to have low-latency, on-demand computing and storage in the region.

What are your biggest challenges?

Financing is one of the key challenges. Another problem is the lack of ready availability of technology hardware — buying a good computer monitor or an Ethernet cable is much more difficult here than it would be in the US.

Future plans for Kili?

We want to take the service to Southern Africa and West Africa so that organisations can deploy on a pan-African scale.

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