Who is ATIO?

ATIO is a B-BBEE Level 2, black-owned company that has been providing specialised ICT services for over two decades. ATIO's doors opened in 1986, and in 1997, ATIO moved into its current headquarters in Rivonia, Johannesburg.

ATIO has support offices in Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth, and has over 200 customers in several African countries under contract. This enables ATIO to offer exceptional service to its growing customer base, making ATIO a leader in providing specialised ICT services.

"Black economic empowerment has always been a priority for ATIO," remarked ATIO's CEO, Chris Van der Sande. "We are committed to transformation through the staff equity and procurement strategies that form the foundation of our day-to-day endeavours. At ATIO, we regard training and skills development not as an obligation, but as an investment in the future of not only ATIO, but in South Africa as a whole."

Van der Sande noted that ATIO's Level 2 Status and recognition as a value-adding supplier gives ATIO a marked advantage over companies that have a lower rating, as ICT customers in South Africa tend to take supplier ratings into account before making purchasing decisions. "We believe that what makes ATIO unique is our skills and business ethics. It's a philosophy that has led us to develop a culture and style different to any other ICT organisation, delivering greater benefits and value to our clients," said Van der Sande.

ATIO's two divisions each focus on clearly defined niche markets. ATIO telecoms division provides service assurance and network performance management solutions to telecoms operators, service providers, technology vendors and regulatory authorities across Africa. The division also offers selected unique products to its customers to permanently enable their service assurance and quality management processes, such as IXIA and Wadaro.

ATIO interactive division focuses on the provision of high quality solutions and services for contact centres and is a leader in voice, data and contact centres in Africa. Dawn Hollingworth, Managing Director of ATIO's interactive division, notes the core offerings ATIO has are complemented by best-of-breed advanced applications, which assist companies to improve their customer experience. "With business drivers such as the need to decrease operational costs, increase customer value and minimise customer churn becoming more apparent, our clients look to us to identify and implement relevant enabling information and communication technologies to support these drivers."

The solution sets currently offered by ATIO are: unified communications and collaboration, contact centre infrastructure, workforce optimisation, interaction management, business intelligence, integration tools, systems management, connectivity and networking. "By offering these solution sets complemented by ATIO's professional and managed IT services to a broad customer profile, ATIO has shown how its focus has changed from merely selling products and services to that of selling solutions," concluded Hollingworth. The division has for years been rated tops certification wise for Avaya, Nice Systems, Microsoft, eGain, Nectar, to mention but a few.

According to Van der Sande, although ATIO is probably one of the largest service providers in the voice market, the company has never aimed to be the biggest, but rather the best. This can be seen in the results of ATIO's Annual Customer Satisfaction Survey. Averaged over the past five years, over 85% of ATIO's customers have said that given the choice, they would buy from ATIO again and they would recommend ATIO to other companies, colleagues and friends.

In 2014, that rating was a stunning 98%! The company's customer retention and renewal rate is also exceptionally high. "We are very proud of stats like these and it proves that our investments in our people and processes are yielding returns with our customers and ultimately our business," concluded Van der Sande.