"Internet boom times are here again. Not the hype of the '90s, but the time of real applications. SA entrepreneurs should think Internet and globally," says Willem van Biljon, a former director of Mosaic Software.
Van Biljon was speaking at the 5th birthday celebrations of company incubator the Bandwidth Barn, a project of the Cape IT Initiative (CITI), of which he is a board member.
He said South Africans should become immersed in the information culture that has been stimulated by the growth of the Internet.
"In the US, using online services has become second nature to everybody. The information is just available through 3Mb lines going straight into the homes. We have not yet begun to think along those lines," Van Biljon said. The fastest connection currently available to South African Internet users is six times slower, namely ADSL at 512kb.
He also said that South African IT entrepreneurs should think globally from the very beginning.
"Mosaic Software (recently sold to the US NASDAQ-listed S1 Corporation) initially had a few anchor clients in SA, but our initial success with first tier financial institutions was overseas. It was on the basis of that success that we managed to gain deeper penetration into local customers," Van Biljon said.
He is now a member of US online group Amazon.com`s Development Centre SA, which is located in Cape Town.
Van Biljon also made mention of the fact that companies inhabiting the Bandwidth Barn have employees that literally feed 1 000 Western Cape families.
"Very often people think of business as being impersonal. But the fact is that a project like the Bandwidth Barn actually supports bread winners," he said.
Odette Potter, general manager of the UUNET Bandwidth Barn says, "In the past five years, 142 businesses have passed through our doors and 111 of them are still in operation."
The Barn measures its success on two levels. The first is the long-term operational success of the tenants and the second is whether the incubator is able to break-even financially.
CITI executive director Masedi Molosiwa says the key difference in this model, when comparing it to others, locally and internationally, is that nothing is provided free.
"SA has a very conservative joint venture tradition when compared to the investment in other countries such as the US and UK. But now that I look back on it I believe that it is actually one of the keys to our success," Molosiwa said.
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