Durban adds to the Fabrik
DURBAN may be best known for its sandy beaches, but for those in the know it’s also no slouch when it comes to exploiting another arguably more lucrative form of silicon, the kind found in computer chips.
The city is home to Jse-listed Adapt IT and online gaming heavyweight Derivco as well as plenty of smaller to mid-sized enterprises serving customers across South Africa and throughout the world.
One of the most established is Immedia, founded by Ancie Hassim 22 years ago.
It’s built a strong reputation as an app development house. It’s still probably most well-known for East Coast Access, Kwazulu-natal’s oldest internet service provider – but that may be about to change.
After several months of successful beta testing, Immedia has launched an offering, Fabrik, that promises to be a game changer for the company.
Hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, Fabrik will, according to Hassim, dramatically slash the costs for a company of digitising its customer interactions.
“Until now, when a business has wanted to interact at scale with customers or prospective customers, it had to use a third-party platform, or several of them, such as Facebook, Whatsapp or Youtube. This was far from ideal. The business had to surrender much of its control of the message to the platform, and the security and confidentiality of messages was a major concern,” Hassim said.
Fabrik will allow a business to achieve all of those communication goals on their own branded, tightlycurated and secure platform.
“It’s the kind of service that until now you needed to be a multinational to afford. But thanks to our relationship with Microsoft and our access to their world-leading cloud technology, we can offer Fabrik at prices that put it within reach of small to medium-sized businesses.”
Immedia’s betting big on Fabrik. Over the past year, it’s beefed up its staff complement and recently appointed board member Kevin Leosmith as chief executive. Hassim will now focus on the strategy side of the business.
Given the company’s track record and from what I’ve heard about the offering, I’m pretty confident it’s a safe bet.
Another Durbanbased leader in its chosen field is disaster response organisation, Gift of the Givers Foundation, most recently active distributing aid to victims of the devastating Garden Route fires. It’s just t possible, while just three ‘taps’ gets users started. A set of feedback loops demonstrates ‘live’ evidence of the Gift of the Givers’ delivery and impact on people.” These days social media and a 24-hour news cycle can highlight a disaster and whip up sympathy for a cause more quickly than ever before. Those same factors can also distract our attention more easily than ever, taking all those good intentions with it. That’s why making it as speedy and painless as possible to donate is so important. Gift of the Givers clearly recognises this and other charities and nonprofits would do well to follow their example. Follow Alan Cooper on Twitter @alanqcooper