Started career with telecom industry, Nazmul Hasan is now one of the fintech leaders in Bangladesh. Doing something from own accord made Hasan a complete businessman. He loves to take challenge and whenever challenges come to him, Hasan cannot but grab them. With keen enthusiasm in technology, Hasan created his own company ‘Endeavour Technologies Limited’ where he is hold a position of Managing Director.
FiNTECH team recently went to Nazmul Hasan to know about his endeavor with ‘Endeavour Technologies Limited’ and he shared his knowledge to FiNTECH. Here is the excerpt.
Start telling us bit about you. How Endeavour Technologies Limited started its journey?
I am lucky enough because I got my first job within 5 days just after my graduation being completed. I started job in one MNC in Bangladesh back in 2002 and continued some more works on MNC later. Even I worked for one of the leading banks of Bangladesh in IT department. We started online banking in implementation project from 2003 to 2005 . In 2005, I started our first business and fortunately or unfortunately I am the first of my family who belongs to do business. Since my family has no business background because almost all of the members are involved with government jobs, teachers, doctors or engineers, I had to go through some difficulties. I had no motivation for doing business with me as well that time no hype of Entrepreneurship or Start ups. I also left my good job as I thought I would do something of my own. Anyways, I along with some of my friends started a partnership company. After some years, in 2007, Endeavour Technologies Limited came into being and from then the business has been running good last 13+ years serving 100+ clients.
How is your day to day activity going on in new normal situation?
Huge challenges are brewing around for this. Most of the people do not maintain the rule nowadays like social distancing, wearing mask etc. and so many of the employees get affected with COVID-19 which brings massive impact in our business. If any member or the employee gets affected, he or she has to stay at home for minimum three weeks and we cannot replace anyone within a very short notice. However, the show must go on and we have to continue working. Overall, we are doing not bad maintaining social rules in new normal situation.
Who are the basic clients of you?
Well, when we started telecom industry was booming in Bangladesh. We began our first deed with telecom project, started serving with all telecom operators then. But the thing is, you know ,after 2009/2010 telecom industry investment got slow and all operators started huge cost cartel and it becomes our growth slow . As a result, after 2010, we started to work enterprise market like banks, financial companies, government projects etc parallelly telecom. Basically, for the last two to three years we are working with government projects that focused on Digital Bangladesh. Government agencies, Education, hospitality. defense agency are our clients. Actually, our core business is with government.
What are your basic products? Tell us about them in a nutshell.
Basically we are not the product based company but a solution provider. We keep working on solutions from our end and believe one solutions not fits for all, so we always focused for tailor made solution for every client. We strive to get focal point of our customers. We never focus any single product actually. But yes, we started data center business in Bangladesh and we are the first generation data center business holder. Apart from this, we work with IT, Security solution, renewable solutions and we are going with nowadays IoT, smart AI solution,smart city solution, retail technologies and so forth. Now we have to cope up with our local trends.
You were talking about data center. How much important do you think to have data center in tech sectors like yours?
You know, everything is now in data. If you consider your mobile or when you open it, you switch to data. You post something at facebook, twitter or instagram. Even you very often check your bank account, transact money through cell phone. And also your debit card or credit card also belongs to data format. All your information of social media or smartphone becomes stored somewhere and it is a data center. Also broadcasting industry now turning on data streaming like Netflix, Amazon prime etc.So data center is a grown up industry in Bangladesh. But in global, data center is now cloud based whilst in our country most of the people still don’t have the faith on cloud due to some reasons. However, Bangladesh is getting advanced with it and I do believe all data center in our country will be in cloud near future. Also required attractive govt policy to get investments from tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft ,Netflix, facebook, Alibaba to setup their cloud data centers in Bangladesh. It will boost our localbusiness,govt will get huge revenue as well create huge employment.
Tech sector like yours cannot stop working. So how did you continue working during lockdown period?
I said before, it was a huge challenge for us. We are working with data center and it is much more critical. No data center stopped working but continued ‘live’ during lockdown period. Physical office was not there during that period, tried to work from home but some support services like maintenance service, typical service, field service etc. and for this some of our employees had to come up to office risking their life. But of course, we provided all the support for them during this lockdown period.
Do you think home office is better than physical office especially for tech companies like yours?
Actually, it depends in some criteria. If it is about a software company, it is okay working from home but solution company like ours is difficult working from home. And if you think of our local customers, you will see, our customers still love talking to face to face. We had zoom meetings, webinars but people were not interested all on it. Basically, people are not used to this practice. In some cases home office is much better but here is no alternative of physical working especially for us.As we know COVID 19 front liners are doctors ,police journalists etc but ICT companies and professionals keep alive banks ,govt operation, online educations, online meetings, health services etc they deserve minimum rewards/recognition from society and government.
Where do you want to see your company within next five years?
We are a solution provider company and we are going to next step in a trendier way. Since super competition is on the rise, we are going to work with data center in full-fledged specially focused on Edge datacenter, hyperscale data centers, modular prefabricated DC etc. Moreover, we are working some other projects and want to introduce newfangled products that were not used before for the customers within a customized production house. Besides, we want to go with some smart electronics equipment too. Besides, we are going to work for agro industry since it is one of my concerns. It is actually a smart farming. So we like to popularize this in Bangladesh within a very short span of life because we believe agriculture is the key factor for taking Bangladesh to the world doorstep.
Thank you very much for giving your time to us.
You are welcome.