Pragmatic Works, a company that focuses on the Microsoft business intelligence, information management and database administration consulting spaces, today opened a Cape Town office.
Mark Stacey, Pragmatic Works SA founder, says the company will target the Cape Town market, starting specifically with the SharePoint 2010 and SQL 2012 products from Microsoft.
He says Cape Town was the obvious choice, as the company has existing clients there and therefore a business base to work from.
“Our main focus will be building relationships with people and companies in Cape Town. Our business model is quite different; we focus a lot on education and on community participation, and take time to educate our customers, instead of just dropping a box off as it were.”
He says the company does a lot of online events, and many free training events, too. “We also provide formal paid-for training, online courses and in-person workshops. Although many people therefore know us as a training company, we are primarily a consulting house, with a software division.”
Coinciding with Pragmatic Works' Cape office opening will be the introduction of a product line of 'vertical appliances'.
In this way, delivering a solution to clients is as simple as dropping off a server or server rack at clients and connecting it up to their systems.
The first vertical appliance to be unveiled is a Retail DataWarehouse appliance - pre-built BI software for the retail market, including reports, dashboards, alerts and custom visualisations, as well as a content management system and Web 2.0 collaboration functionality.
The retail industry faces several challenges, he explains. A retail company would buy servers, buy software, and then begin the long project of how to use them, what to implement and suchlike.
He says a pre-built solution solves this problem, and can be used across all sorts of verticals, adding that every industry has a similar set of problems.
“Our subsequent launches will be appliances for Mining Project Management and Mining Machinery Management in early 2013, and Financial Services, the schedule for which is still being finalised.”
Stacey adds that the company is also very excited about its recent partnership with Microsoft and HP, which will see Pragmatic Works acting as an integrator that will put product sets together, offering value and delivering solutions instead of just products to its clients.
He says there are two appliances here. The Parallel Data Warehouse, a highly scalable appliance for enterprise data warehousing, delivers high-performance and scalability. This architecture helps enable more scalability, increased performance and a lower cost per terabyte, when bearing in mind the enormous energy savings.
The other appliance, Private Cloud Appliance, uses advances in core infrastructure and application platform software and hardware technologies to virtualise workloads on one infrastructure. It leverages virtual and scalable infrastructure to allow hundreds of servers to be reduced to single-digit numbers, and efficiently consolidated.
Pragmatic Works employs 10 people in its Johannesburg office, and will open the Cape Town office with Stacey and two others.
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