Magic SA, a division of Exsol and a member of the MGX Holdings group, has appointed Doug van Vliet as its GM. A proponent of Magic since it entered South Africa in 1992, Van Vliet has 24 years of experience in the IT industry and related investment fields. Magic SA is the sole authorised distributor of the Magic development platform in South Africa.
"People are the most important part of any business," says Van Vliet. "If you don`t have good people, you won`t be able to build on a strong application."
Accordingly, Van Vliet intends to break through the marketing hype often associated with high-level development tools such as Magic, and concentrate on supporting the people who take the product to market.
"Magic has been ignored in mainstream development circles, in turn isolating its application in the broader community," says Van Vliet. "To address this we`ve embarked on educational partnerships with prominent colleges and technikons to bring Magic through the grassroots as the entry point for aspiring development professionals."
Magic SA is some way down the road to making Magic more accessible to graduate developers, with people, rather than product, the focus through education.
"Our relationship with Magic University in Israel is the first phase of this drive, making us the only authorised training centre for Magic trainers in the country," Van Vliet says. "Rather than flood the market with Magic developers, our partnership programmes are designed to pull quality people through the ranks to improve service to existing clients and build on support structures."
A programmer by training, Van Vliet started his career at Olivetti in 1975, and has played a major role on the development teams of Kohler, Bayer SA and Intelligent Systems. When Intelligent Systems amalgamated with SA Office Automation in 1987, Van Vliet took on a business analysis role complementary to his role as shareholder and application developer.
Following a four-year spell at DST, Van Vliet joined the TEBA Savings Fund as project leader and manager. He had written TEBA`s banking system while at SA Office Automation, and rewrote the system using Magic running against Sybase before his appointment as GM of Magic SA.
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