DVT has concluded its process of executive acquisition for its Gauteng operation with the appointment of Dr Jaco van der Merwe as director of its services division.
Black-empowered DVT has grown rapidly since January 2004 when Derek Hughes, the CEO, started up the Gauteng operation of the six-year old Cape-based business. DVT has diversified to provide a number of software products to complement its traditional development-based offerings, and now employs over 80 people.
Van der Merwe will be responsible for developing and growing the services division of DVT and rounds out the team of Trevor van Rensburg, director of products division, and Ahmed Chicktay, CTO.
Hughes and Van der Merwe have worked together previously and he was a natural choice for DVT. "Jaco has a brilliant academic background topped off with significant real-world commercial experience," says Hughes, "and I am really pleased to have him as part of my team again."
Van der Merwe has 11 years of IT experience, focused on software development, and had previously worked for Software Futures and Eskom in senior technical, business development and management positions.
"I was looking to join a company that I felt had the necessary fundamentals - a strong management vision, management I could trust with a good value system compatible with mine, a focus on people and a business that will achieve the growth I know is possible in a reviving IT industry," says Van der Merwe.
Van der Merwe brings significant experience to DVT, having previously grown and managed a team of 150 developers. "That team concentrated on Microsoft and Java, so in many ways it is similar the team here at DVT," says Van der Merwe. DVT also focuses on Java and Microsoft, as well as open source technologies.
He says this positions the business ideally to take advantage of current market conditions, which see large organisations moving towards multi-sourcing arrangements where software development and maintenance is outsourced to companies that specialise in that field.
"This is primarily in the large business application environment," says Van der Merwe. "Smaller businesses want packaged software, so a business like ours needs to have a strong services division with a good enterprise skills set backed by a solid product offering."
Some of the products DVT offers, such as Metastorm`s e-Work, support business process management and modelling, allowing DVT to more rapidly develop solutions for its customers. "There are gaps in the market for solutions that require less coding and leverage model-driven development so as to reduce the load on developers. As the market matures, so these tools become more sophisticated."
DVT is positioning itself to provide solutions that leverage model-driven development in order provide enterprise business solutions that are more agile, less technology-dependant and are provided faster than complete bespoke developed alternatives.
"Software automation at this level allows tight integration into business application modelling, and therefore quicker code generation," says Van der Merwe.
The DVT development team consists of a combination of enterprise-level architects and developers. "It is critical to employ people with the right experience because enterprise system development is a different animal to small and medium-sized business application development, purely due to scale," says Van der Merwe.
DVT will work with its current partners, Microsoft and IBM, to expand its markets. Van der Merwe aims to expand these partnerships to include joint sales opportunities. The business is also a partner of Solutional, a local company that develops Radical; Replicon, a provider of time and expense management software; and Metastorm.
Share
Editorial contacts