Corporate, We Need to Talk

Over the last six months I've spoken to tech leads at big and small enterprises, and to finance, admin, HR staff and managers. One thing came up again and again: the way companies pay for technology has to change.

Every business needs technology: software, hardware and the people to run them. None of it is free, and some of it is very expensive. But the cost isn't even the worst part. The worst part is how little of it the business actually controls.

Businesses are paying too much for software they don't own, and it's time to stop.

Let me paint the picture with a company I spoke to. I'll give it a nickname, Moby Enterprises. Moby supplies building materials and hires out building tools. As of October 2026, it has 124 employees, about 100 of them in the field as builders, sales and marketing teams. It serves over 2,000 clients across three regional markets, with revenue of KES 1.2 billion and net profit of KES 120 million.

Moby started in 1980 with five founders, a certificate of registration and a notebook. Since then, it has changed systems four times:

1. 1980s–1990s, paper books. For its first twenty years, Moby kept all its records by hand in physical ledgers: accounts, projects, creditors and debtors.
2. Early 2000s, Excel. At 40 employees, Moby bought its first desktop, a Dell OptiPlex GX150, and moved to Excel. Nobody could transfer the paper records, so they started fresh and copied over only what mattered: active projects, creditors and debtors. That work was so heavy they hired an extra person just to do it.
3. 2005, SunSystems. Moby moved to a high-end financial management system and hired its first IT staff member, mostly to import data from Excel.
4. 2010, QuickBooks. QuickBooks Desktop was cheap, ran on ordinary office PCs and was taking over the SME market. Moby moved its finances there, added PayMaster for payroll and HR, and set up a WordPress website.
5. 2021, SAP Business One. At 118 employees, Moby had outgrown QuickBooks. It moved to SAP Business One and contracted a local provider, Sparo Technologies, to build custom apps and reports on top. Everything worked smoothly, for a few years.

Look at that list again. Four systems in twenty years, and every move cost Moby data, money and staff time. Moby never owned any of these systems. It...