Sponsors
★ Obsidian Open Source Week Diamond
Obsidian Systems is an established supplier of Open Source software solutions. The company was started in 1995 as a modest services provider targeting businesses and organisations looking to integrate and leverage off Linux infrastructure.
Obsidian Systems has expanded by adding both Autumn Leaf and GuruHut as subsidiaries.
The expansion of skills is now a formidable team with Java™ expertise aligning our Enterprise Open Source solution for retail, supporting technology and consulting services across enterprise-ready open-source infrastructure, big data, collaboration and bimodal IT strategies for your business.
Obsidian Systems and its subsidiaries, GuruHut and Autumn Leaf strive to bring three legs to the South African market: the first being vendor-certified products, the second being local skills providing consulting, development and support and the third being vendor-certified training and certification. With these three elements, any organisation can trust the enterprise open source solution provided.
Obsidian Systems is a Level 3 contributor to Broad-based Black Economic empowered supplier of open source software solutions in South Africa. For a smarter perspective on your IT we have expanded our services and grown our expertise to incorporate smarterTeams that smarterCode to the smarterCompute for smarterData.
★ Microsoft Platinum
Microsoft South Africa’s mission is to empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more. The breadth and depth of our mission unlocks unprecedented opportunity as technology transforms every industry and has the power to make a difference in the lives of everyone. Our mission is grounded in both the world in which we live and the future we strive to create and speaks to our worldview which is rooted in the intelligent edge and intelligent cloud. The intelligent edge is the interface between the cloud and the real world. It is the layer of devices we use to access the data in the cloud, speeding up the processing power of the internet of things, helping this new world to react faster to changing conditions, and become more efficient.
In this new world our clients are looking to digitally transform their businesses and to drive empowered experiences for the employees and customers. Microsoft exists to help them realise this through the solutions we build. Our Business applications, Applications and Infrastructure, and Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions, are designed to help accomplish effective digital transformation, by empowering employees, engaging customers, optimising operations and transforming products. Through gaming, Modern Life, and Modern Workplace we are driving quality engagement to create empowered experiences.
Microsoft is democratising technology so that every business can truly harness the power of this digital era. We are the leader in Artificial Intelligence, embedding intelligence everywhere, and enabling every individual and organisation to leverage it affordably, efficiently and effectively. The power of this emerging technology presents a huge opportunity, but it also comes with a huge responsibility. At Microsoft our approach is built around trust, inclusion and ethical AI. We work hard to ensure compliance with key privacy enactments, such as GDPR and POPI. In the cybersecurity space we have led cross-industry initiatives, like the Cybersecurity Tech Accord, and have called on governments to do more, through initiatives such as a Digital Geneva Convention. We are also working to ensure we enable every South African to be empowered in the digital era by providing critical digital literacy training, access in remote areas, and supporting NGOs to digitally transform to empower them to have greater social impact in the work that they do.
☆ Google Gold
Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's mission in Africa is to make the internet an integral part of everyday life in Africa, by increasing its relevance and usefulness, eliminating access barriers for potential users, and developing products that are meaningful for the countries in the region. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia.
Google seeks to inspire developers everywhere by providing them with information and resources, training, and entrepreneurial support. Google works with many developer communities, and most closely with the independently led Google Developer Groups (GDGs). There are 8 GDGs in South Africa (Cape Town, East London, Port Elizabeth, Pretoria, RLabs, Stellenbosch, Vaal University of Technology, Johannesburg and Wits University) and over 104 more on the African continent. These groups meet up, to organize boot camps, workshops, hackathons and bigger events like Barcamps for the wider technologist community.
For more information on Google's developer offerings visit developers.google.com.
For more information on our activities in Africa, visit our Africa Blog, google-africa.blogspot.com or follow us (@googleafrica) on Twitter.
○ Python Software Foundation Silver
The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.
The majority of the PSF's work is focused on empowering and supporting people within the Python community. The PSF has active grant programs that support sprints, conferences, meetups, user groups, and Python development efforts all over the world. In addition, the PSF underwrites and runs PyCon US, the primary Python community conference.
Being part of the PSF means being part of the Python community. In 2014, we changed the bylaws to make the PSF an open membership organization, so that everyone who uses and supports Python can join. To learn more, visit https://www.python.org/psf/membership.
○ Takealot Silver
Takealot.com had expanded to become The Takealot Group – a young, fast growing group of South Africa’s leading e-commerce companies: Takealot.com, Superbalist.com and Mr D Food.
We offer a dynamic working environment with great people and a promise that you won’t be bored, as long as you’re up for a challenge and want to contribute to something great.
We work hard, have fun, take ownership, and are always open to direct feedback and new ideas for where we can improve. Our teams are smart, entrepreneurial, solutions-orientated and completely customer-centric.
Everyone works together with the shared ambition of building the Takealot Group into the leading e-commerce company in Africa. We’re short on ego and high on output, doers as well as thinkers and we LOVE what we do.
Our Engineers are involved in the full software life cycle, from design and development to ownership and maintenance. Our fast-paced, agile deployment cycle means we can iterate quickly and deploy improvements for our customers every day.
○ OfferZen Silver
OfferZen is an online tech marketplace that connects South Africa's top tech talent with over 1000 companies who are working to grow their teams. We flip the normal recruitment process on its head because companies reach out to candidates who are actively looking for new opportunities. Our mission is to help people unlock their potential by helping them build awesome software.
You can check out our website here: https://www.offerzen.com/
○ Aruba Silver
Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company and global leader in networking products and services, acquired local startup Cape Networks in 2018. As Cape Networks we had a big vision: to improve the way the Internet works for everyone. We built a small team of skilled engineers and designers in Cape Town and a product that won us Best Startup of the year from Wi-Fi NOW.
Today, our product is the fastest growing in the Aruba portfolio and our Cape Town-based team is recognized as being at the leading edge of design thinking and execution. Now is a unique opportunity to join our growing our team, build new products, and scale our systems to meet a >100x surge in demand during the next 12-18 months.
Our product gives IT managers insight into how their users are experiencing Wi-Fi, network, and application performance, and helps them fix problems before users complain. Other performance tools are complex and intimidating, built by network engineers for network engineers; ours is beautiful and simple, and our customers love it. Our product is used in offices, universities, banks, hotels, airports, stadiums, retail stores, and more - every business with Wi-Fi is a potential customer that we can help.
We design all our own hardware and software in Cape Town. Our software systems are built entirely in-house using Python, React, lnfluxDB, and AWS Kinesis and other technologies. We are truly a full stack company, with a great set of technical challenges to work on.
○ FIS Silver
FIS is a global leader in financial services technology, with a focus on retail and institutional banking, payments, asset and wealth management, risk and compliance, consulting and outsourcing solutions. Through the depth and breadth of our solutions portfolio, global capabilities and domain expertise, FIS serves more than 20,000 clients in over 130 countries.
Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, FIS employs more than 53,000 people worldwide and holds leadership positions in payment processing, financial software and banking solutions. Providing software, services and outsourcing of the technology that empowers the financial world, FIS is a Fortune 500 company and is a member of Standard & Poor’s 500® Index.
For more information about FIS, visit www.fisglobal.com
○ Citiq Prepaid Silver
Citiq Prepaid is the biggest and fastest growing pioneer in the prepaid sub-metering vending industry. Citiq Prepaid’s proprietary vending system further enables them to efficiently track and manage electricity and water consumption. This aids in reducing costs, disputes and payment hassles.
We are constantly innovating - Citiq Prepaid has created a vending system from the ground up that enables clients (including landlords, property owners, developers and managing agents as well as tenants) to access detailed reports to track and manage utility consumption. Our dev team deploys new features weekly and everyone has the opportunity to work on all aspects of the system.
We are proud of our in-house software development team that builds solutions that rapidly and directly respond to market needs. For us, software development is a key enabler for relevance and efficiency in this space. We are proud supporters of Python, and all of our critical systems are built in Python 3+.
Come visit us at https://www.citiqprepaid.co.za.
Thinkst Patron
Thinkst is the company behind the Thinkst Canary (https://canary.tools) a software (and hardware) product built in South Africa, servicing the world.
Our Canaries are deployed on networks on all 7 continents and are pretty widely loved (https://canary.tools/love). Our people have been at the forefront of both offensive and defensive cyber security research for almost 2 decades and have presented research (or keynoted) at most of the reputable conferences world wide.
Afrolabs Patron
Afrolabs: Create the world.
We help tech startups create great products. Guiding ideas along the path to building the right thing, and to building the thing right.
The Lean Iterator process we co-created starts with ideation and exploration, helping products journey from thought, through customer/market experiments, to iteration planning. This approach is based on Customer Development and Lean Startup.
The Afrolabs Core dev & design team then builds and tests working software as the product grows and adapts based on discoveries. Our teams work their magic in a lean-agile way, based on Scrum and Extreme Programming frameworks. Our server-side technologies of choice are almost exclusively Python and Google Cloud Platform, although there are other stacks in adopted projects.
After helping a product into the world, our TeamBuilder approach helps grow the right development team with great people and culture. Coding is a super-power. To help people in Africa learn to use this superpower, LevelUp (our NPC) is a local organiser for CoderDojo, CodeCombat in the township, CodeRetreats and Lean Iterator. This helps grow talent from 7-70+.
"We are creating the world we want to live in: products, work-places, communities."
MyBroadband Media
MyBroadband is the largest IT Website in South Africa with 1 million unique monthly visitors, serving the local market with technology and business tech news and the largest online community in the country.
