Describe your current job role and a summary of the business model of your organisation?
Abagun, as a Sales Lead at Nutanix in West, East, and Central Africa, oversees customer success and partner profitability. Managing teams in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Ethiopia, he facilitates channel-driven business. Nutanix engages customers directly or through partners, prioritising being a trusted advisor and emphasising collaborative value demonstration to clients through partner-led transactions.
What are your strengths and abilities that you bring to the above role?
Abagun leverages his critical thinking skills honed through cloud expertise to address complex issues within Nutanix and its partner and customer domains. He excels in goal setting, change management, fostering innovation, and providing thought leadership, steering the team through technological shifts while demonstrating business acumen and influencing strategic decisions and alliances.
Please describe the expectations of the end customers that you address. What are their pain points today?
The expectations of the end customers revolve around innovation, cost reduction, and profitability. However, their journey is riddled with complexities, budget constraints, and talent shortages. The pursuit of streamlined management and nimble architectures encounters hurdles during cloud transitions due to unpredictable costs and looming security threats.
Customers eagerly await adaptive, secure, and automated solutions to confront the ever-looming cyber threats while streamlining operations amid workforce changes and skill disparities. These requirements underline an urgent demand for advanced technological interventions to proactively tackle threats, enhance operational efficiency, and fortify security protocols. Embracing automation becomes pivotal in adapting to evolving technological landscapes and staffing dynamics.
Which generic technologies and innovations can make a difference to your end customers business?
Customers’ businesses can significantly benefit from a range of technologies and innovations. At the forefront are cloud smart technologies, offering hybrid multi-cloud platforms that seamlessly integrate diverse environments – be it on-premises, public or private cloud, or edge computing, allowing flexible adaptation to application needs and business requirements.
Cybersecurity solutions play a pivotal role, ensuring a secure landscape and aiding compliance with industry or national standards, especially critical for the public sector.
Automation technologies like infrastructure as code, low code, and no code options streamline operations, alongside unified storage, and infrastructure modernisation technologies. Cloud infrastructure, management, automation, security, and data governance technologies are crucial. Innovation in container orchestration and data services platforms for data management and analysis, particularly for unstructured data, rounds up the suite of impactful technologies for customer business enhancement.
How can a channel partner in your industry disrupt the regional market and gain a leading competitive position?
Partners within this industry wield the potential to disrupt the regional market by adopting a strategic approach with customers, transcending mere transactional engagements.
Building credibility and trust through alignment with top business objectives earns them a pivotal role. Shifting from IT-centric projects to collaborating on broader business initiatives establishes a deeper connection, allowing partners to comprehend their customers’ strategic outcomes, enabling them to curate optimal solutions across a spectrum of technologies within their ecosystem.
Furthermore, it elevates the significance of services – professional and managed services – creating an expanded market beyond mere product delivery, catering precisely to the evolving market demands.
Which non-competitive business in the region do you admire for innovative usage of technology?
The significant strides witnessed in financial inclusion across West and East Africa over the last decade have been impressive. Among the standout achievements are the efforts of companies and partnerships utilising technology to enhance financial accessibility within the region.
While acknowledging the ongoing potential for further advancement, the substantial progress made thus far underscores the transformative influence of technology in broadening financial inclusion. This evolution not only addresses economic disparities but also reshapes the social and economic dynamics, laying a foundation for more inclusive and empowered societies across these regions.
Which aspects of your job role do you find rewarding and which challenging?
Abagun finds immense reward in witnessing the tangible impact of technology on customers’ environments, hearing their success stories, and observing businesses flourish, especially when Nutanix contributes significantly to partners’ growth. However, he finds leadership challenging, particularly making tough decisions that benefit the collective good over short-term gains and balancing operational and strategic roles.
How do you best like to de-stress and re-charge off work?
Outside of work, Abagun finds solace in podcasts, favouring the Oil and Gas series, finding them both enriching and relaxing. He also immerses himself in music, reading books, and indulges in movies to disconnect and rejuvenate. But, among these pursuits, spending time with his family offers a revitalising source of joy and energy.
