Marshal, the Internet content security specialist, grew its business by 42% in South Africa in the past 12 months; now it plans to maintain that figure in the next 12 months by expanding further into Africa.
The company, which estimates that it has cornered 60% to 70% of the local market, a figure that represents 5% of its global revenue, has had a presence in the country since 1999, and opened a local office in June last year.
10Net ICT Solutions distributes Marshal in South Africa, and the country is home to one of the company's biggest MailMarshal customers, currently running over 150 000 users.
"It will be a challenge to maintain the growth figure and it would be ambitious to go for more than that," says Ed Macnair, CEO of Marshal, during a recent visit to the country. "South Africa is the dominant economy in sub-Saharan Africa and it's a brilliant jumping-off point for us. It gives us the ability to stretch into other regions while maintaining a base here."
Mike Hibbert, director, Middle East, Africa and emerging markets at Marshal, based in Johannesburg, says: "We've spent time tying up with local companies that have a presence north of the border. We prefer to leverage off existing relationships we already have in South Africa and that's proving to be successful. We are seeing a significant uptake in revenue coming out of African states and next to South Africa, Kenya is currently our biggest revenue-generating market."
Competition in the region is stiff, particularly with regard to anti-spam products and services.
"We have all the usual suspects here from a product perspective and we're starting to see some of the managed services providers emerging into the local market. We've almost been pioneers in this space globally, and in the past two years we've had a lot of competition come into even the local market, with the many mergers and acquisitions we've seen," says Hibbert.
"Competition is very healthy for the market, it keeps us honest and innovating," says Macnair. "Anti-spam has made it very competitive and the pure anti-spam vendors are a dime a dozen, but there is a lot of fall-out in terms of companies falling off the radar. Many organisations are looking at compliance now and not just spam. They need to satisfy duty of care, and regulatory controls are starting to come to the fore, particularly in the financial markets, and there is a ripple effect now leading that action into other verticals."
Marshal South Africa is looking for skilled employees to underpin its growth in the region.
"We have some highly-qualified engineers in the country and we do some of our software development here, because the talent is here, and it has worked very well for us. One of our products, Service Provider Edition, was almost entirely developed in South Africa," says Macnair. "But we are always looking for new talent to underpin our expanding operation."
He says South Africa provides some of the best software development skills in the world but not necessarily the cheapest.
"The cost of skills here is balanced with the cost of skills abroad. Good talent is never cheap. We do a lot of software development in New Zealand and the cost to hire there is on a par with South Africa," says Macnair.
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