South African Escrow Services (SAES) today announced the appointment of Riaan Jacobs as its Managing Director with immediate effect. Jacobs has been in the ICT industry for over 10 years and has a significant software engineering background.
SAES differentiates itself from the other local escrow companies, often legal companies or management consultants, in that its staff have strong software engineering backgrounds and believe the market has a need for an independent, flexible and specialised company that fully understands the issues of software validation that are so essential in the handling of software escrow contracts.
"Software escrow is all about safeguarding software intellectual rights," commented Jacobs. "Currently it is the ICT companies and the financial institutions that are utilising escrow services, as it is mainly, but not exclusively, these companies that undertake bespoke software development either directly or through the use of contractors. Thus, there is a need for the larger corporates to protect themselves from the possibility of those smaller companies closing their doors, failing to deliver the required modifications, etc, and the former then not having access to the relevant source code, object code and the relevant other components associated with the code, such as documentation, that had been produced for them by the latter.
"It is also important that a regular execution of an escrow contract takes place," continued Jacobs. "We have standard policies and procedures in place that have been tried and tested in practice over the last few years since SAES was established back in 1999. As we have the relevant software engineering backgrounds in-house, we can fulfil these regular 'testing' obligations ourselves and not have to be concerned about outsourcing this type of activity."
"We see the use of software escrow services as just one piece of the 'governance/compliance grudge-cycle' activities that organisations must address," concluded Jacobs. "I think it is only a matter of time before the use of escrow services becomes a mandatory issue on the executive's checklist."
For further information, please contact telephone (012) 654 0610; fax (012) 654 0590; e-mail info@saes.co.za
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South Africa Escrow Services (SAES) is an independent South African company focused exclusively on the provision of software escrows and its client list includes many SA-based organisations such as Dimension Data and GlobeTom.
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