News
Despite the economic downturn in 2009, the Entelect group experienced strong financial performance for financial year ending March 2010. The primary reason for this is that we slowed down recruitment and focused on optimising the software projects, consulting and resourcing businesses. Operationally we also made great strides with our infrastructure, billing, administration and finance divisions. A substantial investment was made in the software products division, which is now performing well and the foundations are there for rapid growth.
Entelect Software's consulting and projects divisions succesfully completed all 36 projects on time and within budget! At any one time we had approximately 25 concurrent projects running. A big thank you to our development teams for their exceptional performance! We can confidently say that every single one of our software engineers are above average performers. The attached unsolicited reference from the CIO of Discovery Health for the succesful rewrite of the Discovery Health Vitality system sums up the achievement of this team and in fact all of our teams. Design processes, knowledge sharing and training were streamlined. This division is still the cornerstone of our business and will continue to be for some time. We are working on some interesting large-scale proposals and have a strong sales pipeline for 2010.
In the software products division we signed on 43 new clients and are gearing for rapid growth this year. We can say with confidence that Entelect Web Manager, Event Manager and Recruitment Manager are best of breed and with our ongoing investments will continue to set themselves apart from competitors, locally and globally. A sizable investment in hosting infrastructure was also made, ensuring that our clients can securely run their business systems on our servers and online products.
Entelect Placements made 62 placements at 27 clients despite its small staff complement! This is a remarkable achievement considering the tight market conditions. Working in a scarce skills market is challenging and difficult, but when the cards are down, quality comes to the fore and is in demand. We have stayed focused on recruiting high-end IT and supply chain skills, which has served us well.
Entelect Cape Town relocated from Cape Town to Stellenbosch. The primary reason for this was that our newly appointed Managing Director of this office, Wally Fernandes, is based there. We wish Wally all the best in this new project and look forward to working with him.
South African job portal Jobs.co.za is now a reseller of Entelect's Recruitment Management System. Entelect’s Recruitment Management System (RMS) was developed to assist recruitment agencies with all operational and support requirements, enabling more placement throughput, and promoting interactive engagement with candidates, clients and internal staff, all through a user-friendly agency specific branded web interface.
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Entelect Software has acquired that illustrious Microsoft Gold Partner status. "Although we had the qualifications prior, we felt that formal certification is essential in establishing ourselves as a serious software design and development company," says group CEO Charles Pritchard. "Microsoft offers a value-added marketing channel to its partners and we hope to work closer with them in delivering software solutions across all business areas."
Ryan Naude, Entelect's Microsoft channel champion, says: "In the near future, we will be obtaining Gold status in other areas too; we're just going through the final hurdles. We've successfully completed several projects using Microsoft technology, which provides us with the flexibility and functionality to achieve true rapid development. We're looking forward to using these technologies in the future."
Besides delivering .NET solutions, Entelect has a strong pool of Java resources delivering solutions to the likes of Discovery and Standard Bank. One of the longer term objectives is to achieve a similar certified status in the Java sphere.
Despite the recent downturn in the economy, this month Entelect started working on a strategic software project with SAAB Systems South Africa. The SAAB Group serves the global market with world-leading products, services and solutions ranging from military defence to civil security.
"We are very excited about engaging with a company of such global stature", says group CEO Charles Pritchard, "Our recent software development successes in the military field resulted in an approach by SAAB Systems to assist them in the delivery of a JAVA related project. We have no doubt that this is a start of a long term mutually beneficial partnership - as is the case with all our corporate clients".
The 94.7 Cycle Challenge took place in Johannesburg on the 16th November. Under the technical leadership of Yatish Parshotam, Entelect managed the entire application software suite without any hiccups. A total of 25000 cyclists passed through our hands, from registration to race day management and support. "A lot was learnt in this exercise and we look forward to injecting the knowledge gained into our new event management software product suite", says Parshotam.
"Entelect is entering the sports management and promotions arena with an impressive suite of software products that should gain full momentum by end of 2009", says group CEO Charles Pritchard.
Entelect ran the software support contract for this year's 702 Walk the Talk which attracted some 51000 people. This is one of the biggest events of its kind world-wide, beating the London, Boston, New York and Comrades marathons in size.
"All IT components ran smoothly and we managed to deliver under very tight timelines", say group CEO Pritchard. "This project coupled with the support contract for the 94.7 Cycle Challenge, will entrench us as industry leaders in this field. We look forward to bettering our service offering in 2009 through our newly launched Entelect Active offering - which is an exciting new initiative from our Software Products business and still in its infancy"
Entelect has launched a powerful new suite of sports management online products, aimed at giving sporting bodies (national, provincial, clubs and event organisers) the tools to enhance their business processes and run their own affairs. The offering is currently broken into Event and Club Management Systems. "This software is unique in that it gives total control to non technical people to set up their online presence and control all aspects of their workflow through the web - including member or entrant management and CRM, database management, online payments, website content management, customised newsletters and SMS's, and a variety of other front and back-office functions facilities", says group CEO Charles Pritchard. "We empower event organisers and sports administrators with powerful self-managing software to run their own affairs - and cut out the expense of bespoke development and support. We have taken a suite of common functions performed by these entities and built our software to support these industries, with a low cost rental and sponsorship model that enables organisations to make use of software that they otherwise could not afford."
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Entelect recently developed a supplier and product management system for global homeware supplier, Direkshinz. The company has a large number of international suppliers from whom products are imported and sold locally to retailers such as Mr Price. The first phase of this system, which was project managed by Entelect's Amar Madhav, went live in August 2008 and is currently being used by around 25 users. The system uses windows clients to capture data as well as product photos and then auto generates PDF presentations for clients.
"Direkshinz' management are confident that the new system fits their requirements well and is a huge improvement over their previous manual data entry using Power Point presentations as a product database. They are keen to go ahead with the second phase of the project, which will incorporate a full order tracking system", says Madhav.
The system was developed using Microsoft .Net Technology with windows clients connecting to a central server. It currently caters for the capturing and presentation of product and supplier information, with the aim of creating a full order tracking system.
Entelect has recently taken over the technical lead in delivering a strategic online solution for Discovery Invest. The project objectives are to provide the public, clients and brokers with a product to view marketing information and to provide back-office transact ability over the web. The programme charter defines a number of separate work streams to address the technology, people and business process to support this new venture.
The team is being led by Zane Gers, Entelect's programme manager, together with senior Entelect JAVA developers and technical architect, Yusuf Bata.
"Entelect is currently delivering ahead of time under very tight constraints. I am confident that we will deliver beyond expectation and that the decision by Discovery to use Entelect to accelerate its in-house efforts will reap excellent returns", says Gers.
Entelect recently put a team together to assist Investec with core banking systems development. "A vast majority of the systems we have built are financial services related, plus the culture fit between the organisations is eerily similar", says group CEO Charles Pritchard. "We place large emphasis on qualification, attitude and aptitude. Couple this with our systems development experience, intellectual property, approach to staff development and the fit is a logical one".
Despite the severe skills shortage in South Africa, Entelect continues to grow "as quickly as it can find the right people", with its sights set on being the preferred software design house across all industries in South Africa. On the financial services front its current portfolio includes Standard Bank, The Bond Exchange, Investec, Alexander Forbes, Credit Agricole CIB, and is in discussions with other potential strategic partners.
"What clients particulary like about us is the transparent and client-friendly way we structure our contracts: Risk averse, no IP issues, cost effective and milestone based if preffered - with no hidden agendas, and of course that we deliver working systems on time" says Pritchard.
A couple of months ago Entelect upped its development portfolio with Nashua Mobile, whereby it is currently designing, building and maintaining Nashua's Business Intelligence (MIS) system. "This project came about as a result of a successful pilot project which is already delivering value to the company", says Pritchard. "Our BI solution will deliver value that significantly outweighs the cost of the project".
According to Ryan Naude, Entelect's team lead, "the advantages of the reporting solution are: Management transparency with a centralised view of the business, flexible and extensible architecture, low maintenance costs and of course a high return on investment".
Entelect is formally building and growing its Business Intelligence offering, having completed related projects with Super Group, Nu Metro Film Distribution, through a partner company, ABSA and Virgin Money.
Entelect recently started working with the Bond Exchange of South Africa, assisting them with their IT applications development and strategic IT project management. "We think they chose to work with us as a result of our high quality staff, track record in financial services, and the fact that we are also based at Melrose Arch - which makes support so much easier", says Entelect CEO Charles Pritchard. "We look forward to delivering value to the Exchange, helping them meet their IT business objectives. There is a lot of work to be done, but we never turn down a challenge!"
This month, Entelect signed a 3 year sponsorship deal with Club 100, one of the biggest national cycling clubs in South Africa. The Club's official sponsor is MTN, while Entelect will be a sub-sponsor together with SAP. "Despite minimal marketing exposure since inception, we have experienced rapid growth in the last few of years - primarily on a word of mouth basis. In order to maintain our growth targets, we have now reached a phase of our business where brand awareness is becoming important", says group CEO Charles Pritchard. Club 100 boasts a large membership base, which gives Entelect excellent brand exposure on cycling shirts and the club website. "We particularly like the concept of a moving billboard".
The sponsorship deal includes brand exposure on members' cycling shirts and the club website, which is currently being rebuilt by Entelect.
The first implementation of the Game Portal Framework, Mobibuzz Games that Entelect developed for Osiris trading has gone Live.
The system went live early April and is aimed at the Indian market. The Framework allows the development time of gaming portals to be reduced and takes over the management of resources associated with game portals, such as games, prizes, languages etc.
"This project was completed under tight deadlines, with Entelect taking responsibility for the technical design and implementation. We enjoyed working with Osiris on this project as they are a dynamic organisation and open to the use of new technologies", say James van den Berg, Entelect's project team lead.
Entelect has always had an appetite for product innovation and development. The Software business in particular has been growing at a steady rate, currently boasting 50+ of the finest software engineers and computer scientists in South Africa, and growing at a rate of aywhere between 3 to 5 people a month. "Many of these individuals have MSc degrees and cum laudes behind their names, and it won't surprise us if we have the most degrees and distinctions per head than any other software development company in South Africa", says Entelect founder and CEO Dr Charles Pritchard. The challenge now is to "collectively channel these creative minds into generating something that will take us to the next level".
Entelect Software's Managing Director Martin Naude has been putting together training (mentorship) programmes for new staff, technology forums, and more recently product innovation forums to drive internal Research and Development. The challenge is to "organically reach our goals - which are big - and at the same time have fun getting there", says Pritchard and Naude. Some ideas that are being thrown around are in the mobile and internet arenas, with one of the objectives being to "quickly and easily enable smaller businesses from an applications and IT perspective without the prohibitive costs involved.... Of course creating a product with mass appeal, would be the jackpot!"
Entelect Software recently acquired formal recognition as Certified Microsoft Partners. "We have been toying with whether or not to get certification for some time", says Pritchard, "as we have always been, and will remain to be, technology agnostic. However, we are finding that Microsoft makes our development life a whole lot easier in a number of arenas, which is in line with our objective of building systems quicker and more cost effectively than our competitors. So we need to be armed with the best tools and partner with the suppliers of relevant technologies".
Bhavnesh Jairam, one of Entelect's programme managers, has succesfully taken the initiative for the company and gone through the Microsoft ceritification process. "Our next step is to become gold partners - for which we already qualify as a result of systems development and trained professionals in this field" says Jairam. "Thereafter we aim to initiate partnerships with other vendors such as Sun Microsystems on the JAVA front, as we also do development work in that area", says Software MD, Martin Naude.
Entelect Software has recently supplied a number of its Senior Software Engineers to assist in driving a variety of strategic projects at Standard Bank's Financial Markets division. "This project is a major milestone for Entelect as it further increases our strength in the financial services space, which is now at the core of online share trading", says Dr Charles Pritchard, group CEO. "This together with the large-scale distributed trading platform that we are building for Standard Bank in the UK makes the bank one of our biggest customers to date"
Entelect is about to embark on a year-end graduate recruitment programme in its bid to employ and position new BSc Comp Science & Engineering and BCom IS graduates in the market.
Entelect Placements will be running advertising campaigns at all major universities in South Africa, which include Wits University, The University of JHB (RAU), Univ Pretoria, Rhodes, UCT, Univ Free State, and others. Entelect Software will also be participating at RAU, where they will be sponsoring the top three prizes for final year BSc IT projects.
Entelect aims to strengthen relationships with ICT departments of all major universities, both from a technical, training and recruitment perspective. One ongoing initiative is closer collaboration with the Johannesburg Centre for Software Engineering at Wits University, of which Entelect has enjoyed silver partner status.
Both Recruitment and Software move today to 3 Melrose Boulevard, Melrose Arch. All operations are in place, thanks to the efforts of Evelyn Pritchard our operations director, and our building contractors, Precise Projects, who have been working against the clock for the last 2 months. The only hiccup being that despite our application for Telkom lines 6 months ago, where weekly reminders were sent to Telkom, they have not delivered! The joys of working with a monopolitsic enterprise - and thank goodness for the mobile operators!
We are working on the problem, so for any enquiries feel free to contact us via the email facility provided on the website.
As from 1 October, Entelect Placements will have a new Managing Director, Christopher Comodikes. Christopher takes over from Entelect's founder Dr Charles Pritchard who will be focusing more on the new strategic initiatives of the Entelect Group.
Chris' short term objective will be to further penetrate Entelect Placements' market presence as an IT and Engineering recruitment company, followed by the introduction of Entelect Placement's in-house developed recruitment technologies and tools to corporates. These tools have been designed specifically to bring down the costs of recruitment and increase the acquisition rate of talent.
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As from 1 October 2007, Entelect Solutions (SA) will be splitting its two business units into stand alone companies, namely Entelect Software (Pty) Ltd and Entelect Placements (Pty) Ltd. This move has been to pave the way for future potential shareholders and to allow the three units to grow independently.
The core thrusts will be as follows:
- Entelect Software: Focusing on software development across all industries
- Entelect Placements: Focusing on IT and Engineering recruitment
- Entelect Solutions: Executive management of existing and generation of new Entelect businesses.
All three businesses will be operating from 3 Melrose Boulevard, Melrose Arch as from 1 October 2007, with the London office head quartered there.
Since mid October 2006, Entelect has been building a Retail Equity System for Standard Bank Corporate and Investment Banking, which went live today. This system enables the bank to handle large volumes of trade for capital protected products. "It involves the conception of workflows to link the various roles and responsibilities of Front-Office and Operations thereby giving a reliable and fully auditable way to formalise the business in such a way that it can be grown in the future", says Shashi Hansjee, Entelect's lead on the project.
The live switch over has been exceptionally smooth, without any problems. "The team really did do a great job on this project and the business is really happy with the system", says Penny Futter, Standard Bank's project manager. This is one of the smoothest, trouble free projects she has ever been involved in at the Bank.
Entelect's bid for this project was a stressful at the time, as the bid was against an established financial services vendor. "We believe we won the project because of our approach, which was hands on with the business from the beginning. We understood the essence of the project on hand, committed to short timelines and our pricing was competitive", says programme manager, Martin Naude, who invested a lot of time with his team on risk to develop a proof of concept prior to being awarded the project.
Entelect recently delivered a design prototype to African Defence Systems (ADS) under very tight deadlines. "The system was technically difficult, we came in aggressively on price and committed to a short time frame, which is why we believe ADS grabbed at the opportunity", says MD Charles Pritchard. Greg Babski, the technical lead on the project put in many overtime hours to assist his team deliver on time. He managed to overcome challenging technical odds and with some smart footwork delivered a workable prototype on the promised 1 April deadline. This impressive delivery has resulted in dedicated team of Entelect consultants working on a number of strategic long term projects within the company. "We are very happy with the delivery ability and skill level of your engineers", says Pieter Reynecke, ADS Software Development Manager, who spent some time with his team conducting a technical audit of Entelect Software prior to awarding the projects.
In October 2007, all Entelect will be moving to 3 Melrose Boulevard, where the group has purchased a sizable sectional title unit. The building is currently under construction and will be completed in August. The Melrose Arch precinct, where developments to the value of R1.5 billion are currently under way, is regarded as one of the ultimate commercial addresses in the Gauteng region.
Demand for these units is high, where recent offers to purchase have been turned down by Entelect management. "We have not purchased these offices for short-term profits. Our objective is to build a home for Entelect staff, where they actually want to come to work", says group MD, Dr Charles Pritchard. "Staff will have chill room facilities, which will include couches, a TV and pool table to let off steam. The office area will be conducive to teamwork and group participation, which is pivotal in a business of our nature", says FD, Evelyn Pritchard, who was responsible for identifying and acting on this opportunity.