During the last few years, Space Age Technologies (SAT) has established itself as one of the leading and most trusted Microsoft solution providers to small and medium businesses in SA.
The SATOps operations architecture has proven its exceptional value as a 24x7 proactive service, usually reserved for the largest corporations, and brings peace of mind to even the smallest organisations. It is, however, not only this core focus that is attracting attention, but rather the question on how SAT is able to bring affordable, enterprise-class services to small businesses.
"Our strategy is very simple," says Mark Geschke, MD of SAT. "We outsource our substantial Microsoft skills to other IT companies with established enterprise portfolios and use the expertise gained during such engagements to continually improve our core SME offerings. This approach allows us to combine the best of two worlds.
"On the one hand, our consultants can participate in challenging, high-end IT consulting and implementation engagements without being perceived as competition, while, on the other hand, SAT can continue to deliver exceptional value to a grossly neglected SME IT market."
Even though SAT is a small company with less than 20 people, the calibre and integrity of individuals forming part of this highly dynamic team are one of the reasons for its phenomenal success and its high regard in South African IT circles.
"When individuals at SAT accept an assignment, no effort is spared to deliver absolute customer satisfaction, even if this means that we have to assist others with their tasks just to be able to complete a project on time," said Geschke.
During the last few years, SAT has been actively involved in the delivery of advanced Microsoft expertise to local and international IT solution providers and skills brokers. The type and scope of these projects ranged from small consultation and training engagements on anything from Active Directory to .NET programming, to large-scale enterprise migrations of e-mail and operating systems.
One such project was the complete migration of all users at the UCT Graduate School of Business from a Novell operating system to a full Microsoft architecture based on Windows, Exchange, ISA and SQL Server software. A similar project in 2000 saw SAT perform the scoping phase for a 28 000-user Active Directory and Exchange 2000 implementation for the University of Stellenbosch.
During another engagement in 2001, SAT was asked to assist a national IT solutions company to help a South African telecommunications giant install and commission its first live SQL 2000 cluster. The installation involved a SAN backend for data storage and two 8-way SQL servers in an active-active cluster configuration that were accessed by five load-balanced front-end Web servers.
Due to a skills shortage at that point in time, SAT was also asked to support the environment remotely for a period of six months until sufficient internal skills for maintaining this mission-critical deployment could be acquired.
Even though SAT's skills are in high demand in SA, an even bigger need for expert Microsoft skills exists in other African countries. Some of the projects completed lately were an Exchange 2000 disaster recovery engagement for the biggest bank in Mozambique, a consolidation and migration of e-mail domains onto a central Exchange 2000 infrastructure for one of the three biggest banks in Nigeria, as well as a Microsoft .NET evangelising session for internal developers at the most prominent Nigerian oil exploration company.
Even though SAT consultants often have to operate under the most adverse conditions, SAT prides itself with a flawless engagement record and the creation of many new opportunities for the respective company that contracted its resources.
"We thoroughly enjoy the thrills presented by such opportunities and like to make a difference. This is nowhere more noticeable than in some of the African countries that we have operated in," says Geschke.
Another specific area of expertise is SAT's implementation knowledge of the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). As a result, Mathias T"olken, SAT's Operations Director, was recently appointed as the only official independent MOF trainer in the Western Cape and has already completed a number of MOF training courses, both locally and in other African countries.
Having performed so many high-end implementations, SAT is often asked why it is not entering the enterprise solutions space as a vendor instead of as a subcontractor to other companies. Geschke has a very spirited, and no doubt, often-repeated reply: "We see our future within the SME market and, in contrast with more lucrative high-end projects, have much less competition to worry about and can deliver more personalised service to customers. In addition to this, we can partner with any enterprise IT company that shares our moral and ethical values to allow it to engage in challenging, high-end projects. What more can you ask for?"
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