I made public the One Oasis Strategy last year. It has become a key element when I analyse firms and how they could approach market entries. The One Oasis Strategy is about finding how to create solutions which can find their first customers within the business. Amazon Cloud has the ecommerce operation as its first customer thereby removing any market demand risk. Samsung Semiconductors has the Samsung mobile devices business as the first customer. With those assured internal customers, these firms deploy resources, irrespective of the market dynamics, because they have found the first customers already, in-house. But over time, the products are now made available to the general public.
Indeed, oasis is very critical and every company has oasis. Your best product is the oasis in your business. Every other product feeds on that best product. If you build your investment around that main product, you will find success, because those investments will have a clear “customer”, and that reduces market risks. In other words, if your new business investments are geared to support the best product, and the best product is doing well, it means the risks on the new investments will be easily managed. Provided the best product continues to do well, demand on the new investment is assured. That is the One Oasis Strategy.
Every product is like the animal that returns to the oasis for water. Every product is like the humans that depend on the oasis for habitat. Provided that the oasis is there, and doing well, their survivals are guaranteed. Yet, as those new products do well, they could find new customers, beyond the first customer (that best product). That means, you can introduce them to the markets for other customers to buy, even when they are supporting the best product, which is the most important reason the original investments were made.
In business, you need to identify your best product (the oasis) and get other products to build habitations around it. I’d spent time in a very fascinating software powerhouse in Lagos: ATB Techsoft Solutions. ATB Techsoft is one of the largest emerging software companies in Nigeria today with excess of 20 great products with applications across industrial sectors. I would be sharing more on this company in coming days. But in a conversation, I asked the MD of the company to find an oasis within his firm. He came back after one week with an answer: its oasis is FinUltimate.
Finultimate offers the most comprehensive portfolio of applications software designed to help financial services companies improve operational effectiveness, profitability, product innovation, distribution / delivery channel growth, customer relationships and enterprise information management.
Now, with FinUltimate, it can deepen other products into the market. What he did is what I expect every entrepreneur to do. Now, from more than 20 products, the company is positioning all as one, even when having the capacities to deliver better results to customers in sectors like education, banking, logistics, education, insurance and more. Yes, for ATB Techsoft, the world now is FinUltimate, and it can take up your software business needs. FinUltimate is homegrown, with elasticity to capture any specific customer needs because it was created in Magodo Lagos in a rapidly expanding business.
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