Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is Enlighten Designs?

Damon Kelly started his business in a caravan. Today, he is the founder and CEO of Enlighten Designs, a prominent web and software development company based in New Zealand. Speaking in an interview, Kelly painted a picture of a company that has evolved over two decades, staying on the cutting edge of digital transformation and helping to address real-world issues using technology.

"Enlighten began 21 years ago in a caravan out the back of my house - my parents' house actually," Kelly recalled. As a broke university student, he was already passionate about building online communities. "I was playing a game called Quake with a whole bunch of people from overseas and we built this big community website around it." To support his project, Kelly approached an internet service provider and offered to redevelop their website in exchange for free hosting for his Quake community. The partnership paid off. "From there they started sending us more and more websites," he remembered.

His trajectory almost changed as he'd planned to return to study clinical psychology. "I decided to give this a go," he said of his newfound tech venture, "and it's been a bit of a long run since then."

Early in its journey, Enlighten Designs developed a strong relationship with Microsoft, which, Kelly said, underlined the company's strengths. "We realised that we were pretty good at the software development side of things. I think because we began from that web background, we ended up bringing this really nice blend, I guess, of software development and creativity with design and interaction." Today, the company leads in areas like data visualisation, web development, and artificial intelligence.

When asked about Enlighten Designs' key offerings, Kelly explained, "We aim to create beautiful digital experiences for our clients' customers and employees." The company's work spans sophisticated website builds using platforms such as Umbraco, Sitefinity and Sitecore, as well as integrating complex marketing automation and CRM systems. "We do a lot of amp mod and cloud modernisation, data and artificial intelligence," he said. "We've got things like the most viewed Power BI report in the world, which is pretty cool."

Supporting this technology-driven approach are specialised teams within Enlighten Designs. "We've got these other teams that run across our practices," Kelly said. "One is a team called Digital Response," dedicated to application-level managed services such as bug fixing and ensuring applications stay current. There is also a user experience and design team, which handles everything from service design to design thinking.

Enlighten Designs' recent partnership with Australian digital services giant ARQ Group, Kelly believes, has further strengthened its market posture. "The ARQ Group partnership's been really good actually," he said, focusing on how each company brings depth in different areas. "They've got really good data engineering and data science. When you couple that with what we do with web, integration, data visualisation and artificial intelligence it's just worked out at being a really, really good fit."

The shift to remote and international collaboration has also benefited the business. "In this new world since Covid's hit, people just don't really care where providers are from anymore," Kelly said. "It's so much easier to go internationally than ever has been, because people just want the best talent - someone that's really good at what they do."

Artificial intelligence, a recurring theme in the company's services, has moved from hype to practical maturity. "AI has gone through these interesting situations," Kelly observed. "You had this first phase where it was trendy, right? Everyone was kind of like 'I want to come buy me some AI'." In the early days, many clients requested AI for its buzz factor rather than its practical value. "Sometimes they'd be like, hey I want artificial intelligence but they really just wanted automation," he explained.

Now, AI use cases are more mature and impactful. Kelly cited examples such as a client facing the retirement of a team member with deep knowledge of plant species. "They essentially used image recognition to build an app that can automatically identify plants as weeds or whether they're good, or how you deal with it in that way," he said. Chatbots and conversational AI, initially seen as gimmicks, are now integral in call centres and digital engagement. "It's now hitting its stride and starting to move into the mainstream, which has been really cool."

AI's democratisation is another trend Kelly is excited about. "AI is becoming far more almost commoditised in relation to accessibility for people," he said. Thanks to user-friendly platforms, small teams can now build sophisticated AI-powered applications with ease. "The AI builder can actually enable people to build an AI-based application with config and a few clicks, which is pretty good actually."

Kelly is particularly proud of the ways Enlighten Designs' technology has enabled clients to help communities. He described a project for the New Zealand non-profit WOW Networks, who wanted to create "a fully automated power retailer on Azure." This lean, digital operation requires just three people to run the entire company, resulting in significantly lower power costs for customers experiencing "energy hardship." "They've been gaining crazy market share. They've been supporting people with energy hardship. It was like a really nice example of where we've been able to use really cool technology and do quite cutting edge stuff, but actually do it in a way where it really helps people and it's done for good," he said.

He also cited work for Sustainable Coastlines, which mobilises citizen scientists to collect beach litter data, now used in environmental research globally. Another project for a regional support authority helped businesses through the pandemic. "We came up with a solution using Microsoft Teams and Power Apps to set up crisis communication so they could help get information out and spread it out to everyone."

Reflecting on the company's unique approach, Kelly said, "It's that ability to go, our clients are in trouble, let's really look at what's going on, understand what we've got that could help them and then get some communication and correspondence out that would help. Just help the community, because it's been a really challenging time, especially for certain clients in certain sectors."

After more than two decades, Damon Kelly still describes his business journey as "a bit of a long run." As the interview closed, he looked back with modest satisfaction, saying, "Yeah, it's been a journey - but it's been really cool."