Asset management software devised by a South African and developed in the UK is winning contracts with large companies locally and overseas.
iSAFE is the brainchild of South African software engineer Stiaan Pretorius who took his idea to a UK development house that used his methodologies and programming insights to develop iSAFE into a market-ready product.
"My design was aimed at enhancing the strengths and eliminating the weaknesses of similar products in the market," says Pretorius.
UK-based iSAFE has distributors in England, SA and the Asia Pacific region.
"iSAFE enables organisations to complete a full software inventory and detailed component audit of desktop and server hardware, network devices and IT peripherals locally and remotely," explains Grant Langton, sales and marketing director of iSAFE SA distributor, SafeScan.
"iSAFE delivers cost savings through asset inventory management, real-time licence auditing, accurate budget forecasting, simple network management protocol device inspection, infrastructure change management and software usage tracking," says Langton.
In the six months since the iSAFE asset management software has been on the market, it has won contracts with local companies such as Total SA and partnerships with black empowerment asset financing company, Innovent and IT training provider, CS Holdings.
It also won a 1 200-seat tender with CS Holdings for African Explosives Limited.
"The product is small, fast and light, using XML for information exchange," says Pretorius. "This enables central deployment to audit enterprises from a single location and makes it particularly well suited to South African conditions, where bandwidth is still extremely limited and expensive."
Last week, iSAFE was chosen by Dutch company AON to provide asset management facilities at its branches throughout Europe, a total roll-out of 13 500 seats.
"This multi-country installation proves iSAFE`s scalability and flexibility," says Langton.
Pretorius says iSAFE has an extremely small client of only 330KB compared with the 20 to 30MB of some competing products. "This makes deployment extremely fast, which enabled us to carry out the installation at Total SA in around one minute per machine."
Other differentiators for iSAFE, says Pretorius, include minimal network impact and adaptability, which makes it easy to customise and provide services such as once-off audits.
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