We’ve been working hard recently to establish a portfolio of select enterprise-class products that we believe will revolutionize the South African corporate market. We have established Marutech within Cornastone Enterprise Management Systems (CEMS for short), to offer similar – but arguably better and more streamlined ESM solutions that are entirely cloud-based – i.e. software offered as a service. Our depth and experience from Cornastone gives us virtually instantaneous capability to deliver professional solutions that are perfectly aligned to the modern and fast-changing business world of today.
SA has generally been slow to adopt cloud computing and SaaS solutions in the enterprise – partially due to our costly and limited international bandwidth capability, but also due to the fact that only a few enterprise-class solutions are offered through local partners able to deliver the required consulting services and support required of these solutions. But all that is changing now, and very rapidly at that…
SA is getting new international bandwidth that we’ve only ever dreamt of, and SaaS solutions such as Salesforce.com and Mimecast have shifted perspectives drastically in the past 18 months. Significant momentum and support for the cloud computing paradigm has been gained – and those who aren’t aboard yet, will be soon. It’s comparative to the common saying about cyclists: “There are only two types of cyclists – those who have fallen, and those who are going to fall.” 
Mimecast has shown massive growth and capability in the complex field of unified email management, and has contributed massively to the adoption of SaaS and cloud computing in SA. Mimecast was evidently also our first pure SaaS solutions that we implemented internally within Cornastone Enterprise Systems, and I can’t tell you how many headaches it’s solved for me as the owner of our internal IT service.
Just some history….
When we started looking at SaaS back in 2006, we were bowled over by the capability and competitiveness of what has now become our flagship solution within Marutech: Service-now.com (SNC for short). Of course our extensive experience in implementing and maintaining HP Service Desk and HP Service Manager solutions (as CEMS) at some of the largest SP’s in SA, gave us all the skills we needed to take to Service-now.com like ducks to water. The mere fact the SNC is cloud-based, can be in full production in half the time, and is so intuitive that even I could figure my way around it without help within a matter of minutes, means that the learning curve is virtually null for our experts and experienced ITSM solution users.
I suppose 2006 was still a bit early to introduce SaaS to SA though – especially at the enterprise/corporate level. We tested the waters for a while, but quickly realized that we’d spend more money trying to sell the solution than what we’d actually make, so we put SNC on ice for a while.
When we decided to establish Marutech towards the end of 2009, we had obviously been watching the market and SNC very carefully for some time, and perhaps we even waited a little too long before getting Marutech off the ground – but of course – our solutions were already familiar territory to us, so we weren’t too concerned. It allowed us to start an organization with exceptional depth and experience – the only challenge – establish a new brand, but we’ve done that before.
To help us off the ground we’re launching an awareness campaign – starting with a web presence and our existing sales-force, but we’re also a major sponsor of the ITWeb Virtualization and Cloud Computing Conference to be held on 21/22 July 2010 in Bryanston.
For now – our portfolio offered to the market is limited to the solutions that we really understand well and can support – that being Mimecast and Service-now.com, but we are already working on expanding the portfolio with products we’ve been researching and testing for the past 3-4 months, so watch this space…
Hopefully we’ll be a recognized and successful brand in SA shortly, so wish us luck and feel free to post a blog at any time.
Enough for now…
Bruce
PS. Maru, incidentally means “cloud” in Sotho – one of our 11 official languages – hence the name Marutech.
Its only been a few days since we signed up as Platinum sponsor for the ITWeb Virtualization and Cloud Computing conference to be held at the The Forum in Bryanston from 21-22 July 2010. We were just in time for the mail-shots and invitation emails sent out by ITWeb – and we got top position in the list of sponsors!
