THE DIGITAL MARKETPLACE CONTENDERS, 16: KAHOOTZ

Berkshire-based Kahootz (which you may also know as Inovem Ltd) is a long-term player on the G-Cloud vendor roster. In fact, even before there was a CloudStore, it signed up for what was then Chris Chant’s App Store for Government. We sat down with John Glover, Sales and Marketing Director, to find out what has happened since.

Welcome to the Digital Marketplace Contenders, John. Let’s start by you telling us about your company; what is your value proposition?

I would say we believe ourselves to be one of the most successful Digital Marketplace ‘contenders’, as I’ll explain. We were set up in 2001 to assist organisations better access the cloud to increase their business agility, allowing them to support improved team collaboration across both different organisations and geographies. Cloud was central to that, as it meant functionality could be procured and deployed fast and on an as-needed basis. Our customers quickly achieved the teamwork and collaboration ethos they wanted and for only as long as they needed it to. We really help our clients to get away from ‘Big IT’ – and all the baggage that brings – which, in our experience talking to customers isn’t just about time to market and cost but the difficulty of configuring, exposing and externalising internal systems to partners and collaborators.

Isn’t that what Microsoft’s SharePoint does?

It does, and 95% of our customers are SharePoint users whether stand-alone or bundled within Office 365. What they tell us is that those solutions tend to be too slow and clunky to be that useful and the former needs too much customisation by expensive and hard to resource specialists to be useful.

Hmm, OK. What’s the relevance of all this for the public sector?

The public sector is increasingly driven by the need to invest more and more into linking internal and external stakeholders together for ambitious transformation programmes. So stakeholder engagement, the ability to share information and work closely together, is really important – and it needs to go well beyond just simple file sharing. What’s happened is that our technology has been adopted by some very big names in the sector to support this very kind of multi-agency projects and new ways of working.

Sounds interesting, can you tell us more?

We’ve secured great work with the MoD and the NHS which are using our platform – white-labelled as Defence Share and futureNHS respectively – as the basis for collaboration. The MoD is using us to support better linkage with its supply chain, for example, while NHS England sees us the best way to support futureNHS ‘Five Year Forward View’ and innovation work, such as around Strategic Transformation Plans. Those are substantial projects, by the way, with thousands of users already on-board, with more to come.

That doesn’t mean we only sell in to big central government bodies, though; we have some great work going on with shared services in local government, for example.

Why did you jump on The Digital Marketplace so early? What did you hope to achieve?

Simple: we knew what a threat, and opportunity, the cloud was! In other words, we recognised pretty early on that new pay-as-you-go procurement disciplines were very overdue and would disrupt the whole purchasing model for IT in government. We needed to adapt to that very quickly: we had to make our service easy to on-board, use, and pay for. It was a great challenge, one which actually helped us to deliver the self-service platform that we branded in 2012 as Kahootz.

How did you find the process of on-boarding onto the Marketplace, and do you have any guidance or others on the basis of that experience?

We were on it so early I don’t think we have had many difficulties to report to be honest. The process is certainly a lot easier than the older frameworks which were typically restricted to a ‘famous few’ primes. I do think our very early security classification status was a landmark move as it enabled our clients to feel sure their information would be properly protected. In general, I am happy to state that we’ve been a big beneficiary of the Digital Marketplace, as it is now, and it’s been a very successful and straightforward commercial framework for us as a vendor.

Great stuff. Finally, if Think Digital Partners came back to talk to you in a year, what would you like to be able to say you’d achieved in the public sector?

It sounds ambitious, but we are the only go-to product for collaboration for both the MoD and the NHS. In a year, I want us to be their de facto choice for external team collaboration and stakeholder engagement. And that would be a great achievement for a small UK tech SME which is what we still are, amazingly, despite what some customers think sometimes, who can’t believe we’re not a big US-based vendor after all we’ve managed to do!

Thanks, John – and good luck on The Digital Marketplace!