Asked for his advice as to whether it’s a smart idea to switch from being an IT leader to running your own company, Nassib Chamoun has some advice for potential poachers turned gamekeepers.
“If you’re looking for stability, my recommendation is to stay where you are as an employee,” he says. “If you can accept risk and a challenge, and have enough energy to make that shift, the methodology is not a big issue. But it will require a lot of effort and time, so you have to sacrifice somehow, maybe family and friends, for a certain period to have focus.”
In 2016, Chamoun left an IT management role at a Middle East-based bank to apply lessons he learned there to a wider audience. His company, Cirrus, is a domestic cloud managed services provider based in Lebanon and Egypt that is largely focused on the financial sector, including banks, insurers and fintechs. It started by delivering infrastructure as a service, and branched out to accommodate platform as a service, security as a service and managed IT services.
Pros and cons
Is there an advantage to having been on the other side of the fence when dealing with IT suppliers?
“There is a positive and a negative side,” says Chamoun. “Having a good technical background facilitated a lot of conversations to persuade clients [and help them to] set overall strategy. But making the shift from customer to vendor was a big challenge for me personally. It was not so easy to shift from being the ‘king’ as the customer with power to decide, to the other side of the table, trying to be nice.
“Managing a company is completely different to being a CIO or CTO – you have different angles and challenges. And the situation in Lebanon has a lot of ups and downs [including geopolitical tensions].
“What I learned the hard way was you have to try to speak less and listen more, always avoiding trying to convince the client only by technical criteria and discussions [alone]. Building a partnership is always better than dealing with the client only with closing the deal, gaining some money and leaving [in mind]. Most of the customers became friends.”
Security split
Cirrus already claims about 70% market share of the financial sector in Lebanon, and it started operations in Egypt three years ago. In 2019, it split itself into two, with Cirrus mostly on the IT side, and a new brand, Absega, centred on being a managed detection and response (MDR) cyber security provider for cloud and on-premise environments. Together, the companies have a total of about 150 staff.
“People are asking for fully managed services. They want to focus on their own businesses and outsource all the IT stack to us”
Nassib Chamoun, Cirrus
“People are asking for fully managed services,” says Chamoun. “They want to focus on their own businesses and outsource all the IT stack to us.”
How he got to this stage is an all too rare example of the IT chief as a future entrepreneur.
“I worked for a bank for 20 years. This was a regional bank building a dedicated private cloud,” he recalls. “We were assessing multiple solutions like VMware, Nutanix, Oracle IBM … different technologies. The bank decided to go with VMware.
“We started to migrate our workloads from the physical to a virtual environment, and we faced a lot of challenges, not in the initial build, but more in operations and day-to-day tasks and maintenance. I decided a few years later to build a company offering domestic cloud services because I realised that building private clouds for one client is a waste of money and energy.”
SAN ban
The next stage was to conduct a core supplier assessment, paying special attention to scalability and maintainability, hence no storage area network (SAN) or three-tier models. The winner was Nutanix, because Chamoun and his team felt that it was the only provider offering a rapid way to ensure compatibility between elements such as the operating system, firmware, virtualisation layer, hardware and application.
“Nowadays, they call it a one-click upgrade, but back then, in 2016, it was a few clicks,” he recalls. But that was way preferable to the “nightmare” of manual compatibility for every upgrade or release cycle with attendant blame games and “pointing fingers”.
Today, Cirrus prioritises Nutanix where possible, including its Kubernetes container iteration and its Flow product for network microsegmentation.
Having a good partner ecosystem is key for service provider competitive differentiation, Chamoun contends. But stealing a march on technology adoption is critical too, so Cirrus is sprinting to incorporate generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to more rapidly respond to first-line-of-defence security threats.
“The ones who know where and how to use AI will survive, and the rest will die or be left behind,” Chamoun says boldly. “We cannot compete using old legacy tools.”
Back to the future
Reflecting on his journey, Chamoun says he is grateful for the help of mentors in his holding company who helped him learn the “soft skills” of sales and pre-sales activities – negotiating, communicating and conflict management. And looking ahead, he has expansion plans for Saudi Arabia, and perhaps Iraq.
But for those who want to mimic his transition from IT chief to IT company founder, he has a warning: “You won’t have time to enjoy family and friends for some time.”