SCALING UP

ekar raised a $12.5M Series B, the 5th largest venture round in the Middle East in 2019. Despite the pandemic, the company is still well on its way to disrupt the car rental market and reshape mobility across the Gulf. Vilhelm Hedberg, Founder and CEO, eKar discusses how the company has coped with the disruption due to the pandemic and has a positive outlook up ahead

Vilhelm Hedberg Founder and CEO, eKar

How has ekar as an organization responded to the challenges of the pandemic from its early days? Have the employees been working from home?

ekar management was quick to recognize that measures needed to be acted upon swiftly in order to ensure the safety of both internal and external stakeholders. We initiated the relevant contingency protocols and had the entire ekar team working remotely within 48 hours, prior to any governmental requirements to work from home. We were well prepared.

Have you started out operations at the office or continue work from home mode?

We are easing back into the office, ensuring that we follow all governmental protocols.

How was business impacted and do you expect a return to a more positive trend soon? Is this already happening - can you mention with respect to all markets you address?

The mobility industry took a hit during the COVID outbreak. ekar was averaging 3,000 trips daily prior to the outbreak, and quickly took an 80% drop in April as certain cities were under a full lockdown.

ekar has seen positive trending, with its Saudi service on track to a record month for June 2020. We are launching the Riyadh Airport service this month, and will continue to onboard car rental cars to our service via ekar Fleet, ekar’s SAAS platform that allows car rental and leasing companies to tokenize their fleet to rent digitally. We are going to have a huge impact on the car rental industry over the next year.

Further, we have a brand new service called subscription sharing, whereby a customer can lease a vehicle for 1-6 months and then re-share the car on the ekar platform for credits when not in use. This is launching in September, and we already have thousands of cars committed to the program.

How do you look to plan the road to full scale operations and by when? or do you have plans to have a percentage of your workforce working from home as so many companies globally seem to be considering?

We are fully up and running and are already scaling up the fleet. In terms of work from home, we are in the midst of reviewing this right now. Like many other companies globally, this crisis has opened our eyes to the fact that people can work from home. Remote work can not only save costs in rent, but can provide ekar access to talent around the world.

What have been the collaborative technologies you relied on to keep the operations on as normal as possible?

We relied heavily on Zoom meetings to keep operations as normal as possible. For our customer service team who need to attend to our customers and their queries, we also relied heavily on our CRM system that we had to tweak in order to ensure it could be utilized from home.

BUSINESS IN THE MIDST OF THE PANDEMIC

Companies in the tech sector manage to align well with the demands of the new normal

The pandemic has disrupted the world as knew it and all industry predictions have gone haywire. A few months into what is shaping up as a new normal as they call it fashionably, we are taking baby steps getting our Businesses back on the move.

Companies have readjusted and in line with the guidelines from the authorities. In the Technology segment, companies have more or less enabled effective work from home measures for a good percentage of their workforce and in part with sparse attendance at the office premises itself to ensure they are taking all safety precautions. Safety takes precedence over all matters of commerce.

Aaron White, Regional Sales Director – Middle East at Nutanix says, “First and foremost, our top priority is to protect the health and safety of our employees, customers, partners, and communities. We are assessing the situation daily, keeping the well-being of all of our stakeholders’ safety top of mind. As a company, we are following the guidelines issued by the World Health Organization and local, regional and country guidelines to guide our actions.” continuity plan into effect. This went a long way in ensuring no interruption in its services to its customers.

“At the start of the crisis, we immediately began the implementation of our business continuity plan, which is driven by a small group of global executives representing all of the critical functions inside Nutanix. Capitalizing on our own technologies and business continuity plan, Nutanix remains open for virtual business around the world. We have also implemented a number of precautionary measures to ensure uninterrupted service to our customers and partners and the continued safety

and productivity of our employees. In an effort to protect the health of our employees and visitors, we have implemented work-from-home procedures for our global workforce and ensured employees have access to laptops, VDI infrastructure, adequate internet bandwidth, and expanded VPN capabilities,” adds Aaron.

Likewise, Zoho was also quick to counter the challenge at hand. The company itself, a powerhouse today of cloud-based business-productivity and collaboration software products, had a good advantage to start with in facing up to the challenge.

Ali Shabdar, Regional Director, MEA, Zoho Corp says, “We adopted a worldwide work from home policy early in March before the public lock downs were put in place. Within three days of making the announcement, 8000 people across 12 countries were able to start working remotely. Having access to Zoho's enterprise level collaboration and communication software that work seamlessly together was a major boon. As mentioned earlier, our communication and collaboration tools were heavily used to organize the teams and set up policies for remote working.”

He elaborates further, “Zoho runs on Zoho. We moved our entire operation— sales, marketing, customer support, finance, legal, IT etc.—using the Zoho suite of 45+ applications. Once an internal decision was made, weeks before the global call to work from home, with little adjustments we were able to continue our work remotely. The apps that we cannot live without are Meeting and ShowTime for video calls, webinars, and conferencing Cliq, Connect, and Mail for communication, and our office and project management apps.”

TP-Link, the networking vendor, responded to the situation by following a routine where only 30% of its workforce was attending office while the rest operated from home.

Lucas Jiang General Manager TP-Link MEA FZE, TP-Link says, “As per law, the UAE currently allows us to operate with 30 per cent of our workforce during this phase of the lockdown, and that is precisely what we are doing. The rest of our staff is continually devising innovative ways to increase their efficiency and productivity while working from home.”

TP-Link is trying to replicate office routines for work from home via new methods to continue following old practices that help track and monitor employee performance.

“Like the proper clocking-in and clocking-out system in place at our workplaces, we are following the same during this period of working from home –Moreover, they are also required to fill out daily work-reports that the HR department can evaluate to ensure that employee productivity isn’t taking a significant dip during this pandemic. This is a learning opportunity for all of us, and we can see that the requirement for our latest technologies and offerings is swelling during this time as home-office network demands shoot through the roof around the globe.”

The transition has required a good bit of advance planning and execution even for companies that are Technology leaders.

Ali says, “Going remote isn’t just a matter of flipping a switch and assuming that everything is business as usual. It took a substantial amount of coordination and effort to ensure that we continue serving our customers while also keeping our employees safe. We set up trial runs with selective teams a couple days before making the official announcement. We then started helping our customers going remote as well with the launch of Zoho Remotely. We have seen a surge in the interest from the market and we work tirelessly to serve everyone to the best of our ability.”

Zoho released a remote-working toolkit, put together specifically to help businesses transition smoothly into remote work.

“It is no easy task, especially when many business operations require you to be on-the-ground and have in-person communication. The Zoho RemoteAaron White Regional Sales Director – ME, Nutanix

ly is at the core of offerings to help businesses make this happen. It is a suite of 11 business apps specifically bundled for remote workers and to help our customers more, we made it available for free until July 1, 2020.”

As a fully bootstrapped company for more than 20 years, Zoho was also aware of the challenges growing busi— By Diksha Vohra nesses face. With that in context, Zoho launched the Small Business Emergency Subscription Assistance Program (ESAP).

“Our goal is to lighten the financial burden on those small business customers who have been severely impacted by the economic disruption. We also tapped into data resources and created Coronavirus Tracker Dashboards using our BI platform, Zoho Analytics. These are designed to give everyone clear and up-to-date information, so they can make informed safety decisions and take the necessary precautionary measures.”

Nutanix has seen itself at a good advantage in the evolving situation as it has relevant solutions that cater to en-

Ali Shabdar Regional Director, MEA, Zoho Corp

abling remote work. They are addressing these new opportunities coming their way as many companies across different verticals are in process of enabling the new way of working.

Aaron adds, “As mentioned, we have transitioned smoothly to the new normal. In fact we have seen an increasing interest in our remote working solutions from enterprises in the region. Our solutions (for example, virtual desktop with our partner Citrix or desktop-asa-service with our product Frame) can help organizations adapt to this rapidly-evolving situation by allowing them to support their employees to work productively from remote locations. We have many customers in different verticals, including government entities and educational institutions and it is a chance to help organizations quickly provide viable work- or learn-fromhome options.”

TP-Link has ensured its operations were on schedule but with strict adherence to safety guidelines and the 30% formula for office attendance. The experience of the work from home set-up has revealed to the company that the home segment now indeed needs high er bandwidth wi-fi connectivity. Lucas says, “Our main challenges lie around managing work from home logistics as this is relatively new for everyone and something we’ll have to learn to adjust to and come on top of as the situation is far from over gauging from its current status. The biggest challenge that everyone, including our workforce, is currently experiencing is also one of our most significant business growth opportunities at the moment – the increasing demand for seamless WiFi and connectivity at home. This is where our forward-looking hi-tech products come into play because this is the very problem they are built to cater. Internally, we are overcoming this challenge by allocating the workload smartly so as to manage it and remain on top of things efficiently.”

While there may be some relearning adjustments called from employees as they go completely digital when working on remote basis, companies like Nutanix and other technology vendors who may already have had a percentage of workforces working remotely, look geared to make a seamless transition.

Aaron says, “As a global IT company, our current infrastructure was designed to support remote work, with half our global workforce already working remotely in their day-to-day roles. We were already well prepared to continue running our business and focusing on our customers during a crisis”

Digital transformation is key to successfully managing remote working. However, the measurement would vary based on what an employee’s profile is and how they are able to cope and adapt to the ‘new normal’.

Lucas says, “Digital transformation is a journey that can be different for each resource, and our management is working towards understanding and enabling each member of the staff on the basis their individual needs. They engage with their team members to gain a clear understanding of the conditions under which they perform best, their concerns about their workflow and their emotional response to the situation. Our managers are using a customization of tools and motivators that work best for each member. On the whole, we are making extensive use of platforms like Zoom for meetings and WhatsApp and WeChat for one-to-one communication.”

He adds that however, there is no major re-skilling expectations or requirements from employees in the changed context. The challenge is to maintain the work discipline when working from home.

Lucas says, “The challenge is in conditioning themselves to manage a work routine from home and complete their tasks without dampening their productivity much despite the lack of an office-like feel. We try to look at it more like re-adjusting as per a new working environment that the workforce is already too familiar with while they continue doing what they were doing earlier in terms of work.”

Zoho's culture enables its employees to always be in the know of the current trends and build exceptional solutions. The hand on approach to technology is pervasive across the company culture that ensured there were far few hiccups in the transition and everyone was up to speed.

Ali says, “We have active (internal) channels on Zoho Cliq and groups in Zoho Connect discussing various topics, global challenges, and possible solutions. We are a hands-on company by design. There is a good synergy between the leadership, product teams, and the teams on ground to ensure we all stay up to speed with how to improve ourselves and in turn improve the solutions we provide to our customers.”

The supply chain has likely come under duress as factories remained closed in parts of the world during the peak of the pandemic infections, but companies seem to have coped to a good extent. Likewise, on the support side too, companies have used technologies to reach out to customers.

Aaron says, “We’ve conducted a supply chain analysis and created contingency plans with our key suppliers.

Based on current information, we do not anticipate any immediate supply constraints, though the situation is obviously fluid and could change. We will keep our community in the loop as new information becomes available. Our worldwide support teams and other key functions remain up and running and ready to attend to all customer and partner needs. Based on the analysis we’ve done to assess both hardware and software support capabilities, we have contingency plans in place to allow us to continue to provide 24x7 worldwide support to our customers at this time.”

A manufacturer of networking hardware products, Lucas concedes that there has been a disruption in the supply chain.

He says, “As mentioned earlier, logisfice-like feel" tics has definitely been affected owing to the lockdown rules that have been put in place for everyone’s safety at the end of the day. However, our after-sales support remains as prompt as ever – we were remotely assisting customers earlier, and we continue to do so during the COVID-19 lockdown period. Technological advancements and the intelligent architecture of our offerings make things easier for both our customers and our technical support staff as many situations don’t actually require site visits. All our support lines are being forwarded to the technical support staff’s mobile numbers, and we already had applications in place to help customers with routine issues and troubleshooting.” As the world gets used to the new circumstances, companies have been getting around the challenges and doing so through regular online meetings with customer and partners. There has been a substantial interest and demand for solutions that enable work from home and there has been a spurt in online shopping as well. For vendors, who have solutions that fall into categories that are seeing demand are catering to this need.

Lucas says, “Given the current COVID-19 circumstances, everyone around the globe is more or less being pushed to work from home for an unforeseeable amount of time. This shift from workplaces to home offices has caused a consequential and exponential rise in the demand for better networking solutions, speeds, and bandwidth. Moreover,

"The challenge is in conditioning themselves to manage a work routine from home and complete their tasks without dampening their productivity much despite the lack of an of

there is the sudden surge in retail and online businesses and more so for those that operate within the purview of essential services. In view of this, our digital engagements are on the rise with our partners and customers. We regularly conduct digital meetings with our partners.”

Finally, overcoming the challenges presented during the current COVID’19 crisis will require making the company’s digital transformation a requisite, a decision not to be deferred. To compete in the evolving future, companies needs to have the right fit infrastructure that is mostly cloud enabled.

According to Aaron, companies should embrace virtualize desktops and Applications as physical desktops and laptops are becoming a Lucas Jiang General Manager - MEA FZE, TP-Link

poor fit for today’s dynamic, digital workplace.

He says, “Enterprises will stand a better chance of enduring the situation if they have already modernized core infrastructure. They will be ready to meet the challenges of the current environment - or any other challenges for that matter - i.e start-ups , rivals, pandemics. Organizations need to look to modernize their IT infrastructure by enabling increased automation, increased self-service, making greater use of cloud and mobile platforms and optimizing use of data wherein decisions should always be made on the data, despite emotional times.”

While it has not been easy, companies have done well so far to cope with the unprecedented calamity that the pandemic has brought upon the world. The alternative way to work has been rolled out across industries and yet in near future when we find a way out through a good vaccine that can beat covid-19, hopefully a balance would be established between what was before and what we can in future.