Britehouse, a Convergence Partners investee, is still one of the best companies to work for, according to Deloitte’s annual survey 2011. The fact that all levels of staff are empowered to contribute to company strategy makes Britehouse SSD, Britehouse’s specialist SAP division and a leader in mobile business software applications, one of the best companies to work for.

Says Britehouse SSD CEO, Paolo Masselli: “In spite of an extremely disruptive year in which we acquired several companies and then merged nine into four, we still came fifth in the Small to Medium category in Deloitte’s 2011 Best Company to Work For survey – and second in the Business and Professional Services category.

“This was the first year in which we entered the Business and Professional Services category. We maintained our position in areas in which we’ve always had a good standing, and we jumped straight to the top echelons in consulting.

“All of which was possible only because our employees are expected to take responsibility for themselves in getting the job done. For some people, not being micro-managed is frightening. For Britehouse achievers, relying on their own initiative is the only way to live and work, and they revel in it. They also appreciate the fact that our management structure is pretty flat. So their input is valued, and can actually change the company’s strategy.”

In most organisations, retaining staff enthusiasm in the midst of turning over more than R400 million, while simultaneously repositioning to increase growth to half a billion rand in the next 12 to 18 months, would have been more than challenging. But Britehouse employees are committed to the company’s objective of increasing annuity income.

Until 2011, 80% of the company’s revenue was project-based. “The IT landscape is now shifting strongly towards software as a service and, eventually, to the cloud,” Masselli says. “In the process, the need for bespoke systems is dwindling, and the need for outsourced or hosted systems is increasing – and, along with that, the need for support of entire systems.

“Organisations are feeling the need to be able to take their systems for granted so as to focus on optimising their solutions. Some, in fact, just want the output of the solutions, and are looking for someone reliable and innovative to look after both the systems and the solutions that run on them.

“We’re particularly well positioned to do both, because some of our subsidiaries have always either hosted SAP solutions, or managed business processes. And, in most of our client interactions, we’ve had to supply a significant measure of innovation and optimisation support services. So, it’s been a matter of repackaging what we already had in a more integrated way, and filling in a few gaps here and there.

“We might be a bigger ship now, but it’s always going to be a tight one. Our operational philosophy doesn’t change. We’re still exclusively delivery-orientated because we want long-term relationships with our clients and we believe that giving them what they need in as short a timeframe as possible is the best way to encourage them to use us again.

“It’s an extremely disciplined work ethos that creates a great deal of pressure for our employees. But they never get bored. The credit for getting a job done on time and on budget always goes to our staff. And they thrive on it.”

Britehouse Press Release

Article from ITWeb

In a first for South African SAP environments and for the steel industry globally, Britehouse, Dimension Data’s specialist SAP practice, has completed the consolidation of five different SAP systems into a single master system at ArcelorMittal South Africa, Africa’s largest steel producer.
In a project that took 11 months and involved taking millions of records from the previous 10 years of the standalone systems, the consolidated system went live in April 2011 – with subsequent month-ends running as normal.
The short-term objective of the project was for ArcelorMittal to have one set of financial statements for reporting, eliminating the need for inter-company postings. Secondary objectives included enabling users to log into one system rather than four, and thereby, reduce the workload on the business.

During the bidding process, Britehouse took ArcelorMittal executives to visit international sites where successful consolidation projects had been done by its German partner, Corporate Business Solutions (CBS). CBS has developed a framework that manages the mapping, configuring, extraction, manipulation, and migration of data in SAP consolidation projects.
“Those trips proved to ArcelorMittal that what they were planning could be achieved more cost-effectively and in far less time than they had been led to believe,” says Britehouse Executive, Hendri Pretorius. “Our subsequent delivery on those promises proves that, whether a company needs to adapt historical systems to a new template or business model, replicate processes from one geographical area to another, or simply make their business more agile, consolidation of SAP systems doesn’t have to break the bank.
“And, with the right processes and frameworks in place, it doesn’t have to take forever.”

Britehouse Press Release

Article in ITWeb

Convergence Partner’s investee company, Internet Solutions (IS) has acquired a majority stake in locally managed Linux service provider Synaq, for an undisclosed sum.

IS executive for communication services Wayne Speechly says the acquisition boosts the ability of IS to tackle the growing need for managed communication services in the small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) market, through the delivery of robust hosted Linux and open-source technologies. Synaq, on the other hand, will benefit from access to IS’s infrastructure and gain a strong base of support for African and international expansion.

Synaq’s operations, structure, management and staffing will remain unchanged following the acquisition and the company will continue to serve its current customers from its Johannesburg head office.”

Read IS Press Release here!

Article from Engineering News

On Friday 25 February 2011, Communications Minister Roy Padayachie met with the leaders of 30 of SA’s top ICT players to discuss cooperation between government and private sector in order to create jobs and enhance growth. Chairman of Convergence Partners and Dimension Data, Andile Ngcaba, attended the roundtable discussions, which were aimed at developing a 2020 vision for the South African ICT sector.  Andile noted that applications and software are central to the ICT ecosystem and that opportunities exist for innovation and development in these fields. The potential for job creation opportunities would also arise from the production of new set top boxes, required for migration to digital television signal distribution in South Africa.

Andile Ngcaba said: “The conversation that has been started between the Ministry and the ICT industry is encouraging and key in building a strong ICT industry in South Africa.  Out of this dialogue, it became clear that in order for South Africa to meet the challenges and opportunities presented by the emergence of the new ICT ecosystem, it would be critical to have in place pervasive and accessible broadband infrastructure and undertake a concerted effort to up skill our human resources to ensure sustainable and quality job creation in South Africa.”

Vacancies to be filled in six months

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The R250bn pot

Local Microsoft development powerhouse, 3fifteen, a Britehouse Company has announced a new partnership with Vodacom Business, which will see its customers able to – on a per seat basis – rent access to Microsoft’s enterprise software solutions for a cost-effective, predictable monthly fee.

Vodacom will be responsible for managing the multi-tenant back-end systems required to host instances of Microsoft Exchange, Dynamics CRM, SharePoint and Office Communications Server in its own data centre, while 3fifteen will focus on configuring, customising and building the functionality its customers require from their software solutions.

“Software as a service is growing in popularity,” says Andrew McPhail, Business Development Manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM at 3fifteen. He adds: “Customers choosing this path for the running of their IT systems are finding that the flexibility it allows them in increasing or decreasing the number of seats their company makes use of as and when required, as well as some abdication of responsibility when it comes to ensuring the uptime, reliability and performance of their systems are concerned, to be of real benefit.

“It allows them to focus on the running of their business instead of the running of their IT systems – something that’s always been of massive importance to smaller, specialist companies and becoming increasingly important to medium-sized companies looking to reduce their IT spend.”

McPhail says even though the new partnership with Vodacom is a significant move, it will change very little when it comes to how 3fifteen executes.

“We still go through as detailed a process when it comes to assisting our customers in detailing their business requirements and architecting a solution. The only difference is, the work is carried out on a system that is hosted in Vodacom’s data centre and not on our customers’ premises,” he says.

“What this partnership does allow us to do,” he continues, “is afford our customers a more flexible, cost-effective overall solution that’s centred on operational expenditure as opposed to capital expenditure.

“This in turn means their appetite is likely to be stronger for the solutions we propose and they’re more likely to gain increased value, faster,” he adds.

McPhail says 3fifteen believes this new partnership presents a glimpse into how IT systems will be rolled out and managed in the future, and provides both itself and its customers with a solid stepping stone into the cloud computing era.

“We’re intrigued to see how the market responds over the coming months,” he concludes.

See attached link

Britehouse subsidiary 3Fifteen, has, for a second year running, achieved sixth place in the Small Company Category (50 – 300 employees) in the annual Deloitte ‘Best Company to Work For Survey’. Britehouse Specialist SAP Division, a leading South Africa SAP consultancy firm employing close to 300 people improved its ranking significantly from the previous year and was also included in the top ten companies.

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