This entrepreneur helps SMEs go digital

She founded a startup which provides small businesses with cloud computing solutions.

Rather than ruthlessly eliminating competition, Lynette Seah is dedicated to helping smaller and medium enterprises (SMEs) catch up in the fast-paced world of today's digital economy through her own startup.

Founded in 2014, Seah founded Alpha7 with the aim of providing cloud computing solutions and advisory services for SMEs. Three years later, she took it up a notch and introduced the A7 IoB, an easy to use, affordable self-service digital workspace tool allowing small businesses to easily collect, mine, and make the most out of their business data.

“[A7 IoB] is also flexible and scalable to meet the custom requirements of digitally-savvy clients, and can be used by enterprises to provide value-added services to their clients as well,” said Seah. “The scalability of A7 IoB has resulted in users signing up internationally and across a wide variety of industries.”

Seah created Alpha7 and A7 IoB because she wanted to help SMEs hop aboard the digital train. Working in the competitive industry for more than 30 years made her realise smaller, traditional business lag behind in digital adoption. 

However, it was not an easy change for the veteran chartered accountant, despite her more than 30 years in the field including stints at multi-national companies PWC and J.D. Edwards as well as eight years as VP of Finance & Strategy at Salesforce.com.

Seah had to make personal and professional adjustments as she moved from the rigid corporate world into the rising wave of start-ups. Her conviction that data should power businesses to make better digital decisions pushed her to navigate the rocky startup journey.“With data, businesses can understand pain points and make informed data-driven decisions to support and improve business operations, as well as fine-tune their offerings to market requirements,” she adds.

So far, her sacrifices have been paying off. Roughly a year after she launched A7 IoB, the platform has already led to strategic partnerships for Alpha7 in Singapore, Australia, and parts of Europe.

For now, Seah continues her belief that digital transformation is a journey and not a sprint. “In this digital era, we don’t know what we don’t know. The multi-dimensional business gaps in operations, people and processes coupled with data consolidation from multiple sources makes digital transformation complex but interesting,” she added.