Denis Kaminskiy (Judge Business School MBA , 2008) is passionate about disrupting public sector computer services and saving the taxpayer a pile of money in the process.
It wasn’t so long ago that Kaminskiy and his colleague, Lars Malmquist, were facing up to two of the biggest tech giants in the business. As part of their MBA, Kaminskiy and Malmquist undertook a piece of research on cloud computing for BT and Hewlett Packard. “We put it to them that this was a technology revolution, and they should be on top of it,” says Kaminskiy. “They didn’t agree. We reasoned that if the big guys weren’t going to do anything about it, we should do it ourselves.”
So, following completion of their programme in 2008, Arcus Global was born. The company that takes the benefits of cloud computing – enabling software to run on a remote server rather than just on your PC, meaning it can be accessed anywhere – and makes them relevant and effective to the public sector.
“There’s a piece of software in government which manages just about everything – waste collection, school admission or social care, for example,” says Kaminskiy. “We replace that software, which is often 20 years old, with a modern cloud platform, which allows us to simplify and improve a lot of what they do. That makes it mobile, more powerful and much cheaper. We also provide the consulting support to be able to take advantage of all these improvements – so once we’re done, the public sector can just get on with helping people. We’re like a mini-outsourcer.”