Ohm Core builds, connects and runs the digital systems institutions depend on. Full delivery, architecture through handover, not advice from the sidelines.
For any organisation whose systems cannot afford a bad day.
Stephen Otieno Ouma. Every engagement is led personally by Steve Otieno, our founder. Meet SteveEvery one of them is predictable. Every one can be fixed before it becomes a headline.
What we sell is simple: systems that keep working when everything peaks at once, delivered by engineers who have already done it at international scale.
Results from systems our founder led or helped build in senior and lead roles. They are his track record, not Ohm Core client engagements.
Eight services, in the order institutions usually need them. You describe the outcome. We deliver the working system.
Registration and enrolment, claims and case handling, records and reporting, fleet and asset management. Built for national volume, and delivered across multiple countries and regulators.
Making your systems talk to each other, to banks and payment providers, and to other agencies. New systems connected to older ones, securely and automatically, with no re-typing.
Data standards, data residency and cross-border rules, treated as design inputs from day one rather than paperwork at the end. Learned working with regulators on two continents and on a trade corridor between two governments.
Foundations that make change cheap and safe. Kubernetes, GitOps and infrastructure as code, on AWS, on premises, or both.
Monitoring that spots trouble before the public does, disaster recovery that has actually been rehearsed, and ongoing support.
An independent health check of what you already own: how it behaves on its worst day, what fails next, and what that would cost. Usually where a relationship starts.
Cutting what your technology costs to run, without adding new ways for it to fail.
Your team learns to run what was built. No permanent dependency on any supplier, including Ohm Core.
Steve led or helped build each of these in senior and lead roles at the organisations that ran them. They are named so you can check them. References available on request.
M-TIBA, at CarePay
Healthcare, Kenya
A national platform connecting members, 5,000+ clinics and hospitals and 20 insurers, usable from the simplest mobile phone. Steve's work covered the tools that register members and check claims.
Equity Bank and PayPal
Payments, Kenya
Led the delivery that let Equity Bank customers in Kenya move money to and from their PayPal accounts.
Software Group
Banking, Africa and South America
Managed rollouts that let banks serve customers through local agents: cash in and out, bill payments and small-business onboarding, on two continents.
Kenya to UK digital trade corridor (TLIP), 2023 to present
Government and trade, Kenya and UK
Technical lead on a platform that moves export documents for tea, flowers and coffee between exporters, freight companies and government agencies in both countries, including KRA, KenTrade and KEPHIS.
Step 1
We look at how your systems cope on their worst day: busiest periods, key dependencies, weak points. Then we rank what is most likely to fail next.
Step 2
Plans built on evidence from how your systems are really used, and sized for the busiest day of the year, not the average one.
Step 3
Every change is rehearsed and tested before it touches the live service, so improvements arrive without interruptions or surprises.
Step 4
Your team gets the manuals, the training, and the controls. You own the system and can run it with confidence. No black box, no lock-in.
Plan for things going wrong.
Systems are designed to survive bad days, not just perform on good ones.
No single point of failure.
No one person, machine or supplier whose absence stops the service.
Let machines do the routine work.
Repetitive manual work is where errors and delays are born.
Measure everything.
If you cannot see how a service is performing, you cannot trust it or improve it.
A decade of delivery, by sector
Steve has spent ten years building and running the systems behind banks, insurers, health cover and government trade, in roles from hands-on engineer to engineering director.
His roles include engineering director at Ogilvy Africa (WPP), and senior roles at CarePay, the company behind M-TIBA, and at Software Group, an international banking technology firm.
2015 to 2019
Inventory systems for aviation, insurance comparison tools, and an international money-transfer service made four times faster.
2019 to 2023
Banking rollouts across Africa and South America, the Equity Bank to PayPal service in Kenya, and Kenya's largest digital health platform.
2023 to present
Technical lead on the Kenya to UK digital trade corridor, working with government agencies in both countries.
Today
A consultancy where every contract is led personally by senior expertise, and scaled with a trusted network of specialists.
A fair question. Here is the honest answer.
Ohm Core is one principal and a network of specialists. For programmes that need more hands, we work as a consortium partner or as specialist support to a larger contractor.
The person who scoped the work is the person doing it. It is never handed down to juniors.
A director with ten years of delivery leads every engagement personally, from first meeting to handover.
A vetted network of specialists joins as the work requires, so the team matches the scope.
No bench to fill and no layers of approval. Work starts when the contract does.
One person answers for the outcome, and you have his number.
Steve writes about the engineering underneath dependable systems. Short posts, one mechanism at a time.
Your new record is live at the authoritative server straight away. Resolvers keep serving the answer they cached until its TTL runs out.
Read the comments too. Senior DNS engineers sharpened part of the argument, and the thread is better for it.
Read on LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)M-TIBA reached millions of people in Kenya over USSD. A few lines of text per screen, sessions that time out in seconds, networks that drop mid-transaction. Constraints don't limit good engineering. They reveal it.
Read on LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)Low CPU, fast queries, no locks. The real problem was a pool of 10 connections with 40 threads queuing for it. Waiting for a connection and using one are different problems.
Read on LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)Key length gets the attention, but a 4096-bit key generated from weak entropy is still weak. Fresh virtual machines with little entropy have produced exactly that.
Read on LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)An anonymised, illustrative page. Every assessment is written for your systems, in plain language your leadership can act on.
Section 2
Ranked by likelihood and cost. Each risk links to the fix in section 4.
We open every engagement with a free written assessment, in plain language: what could fail, what it would cost you, and what to fix first. A plan you can act on whether or not you hire us.
It starts with a short call. We reply within three business days to arrange it, and the written assessment follows within a week of agreeing your requirements.
Prefer to talk first? hello@ohm-core.com or +254 704 760 842