South Africa’s next goldmine is its skills base says Sbu Shabalala, CEO of Adapt IT Holdings. Empowering our people with skills and knowledge through strategic business investment is key to the continued development of South Africa.
As the only JSE listed ICT Company headquartered in KwaZulu-Natal, Adapt IT is strongly motivated to support initiatives that develop ICT talent locally. The company’s support extends to its employees through training and mentorship in a variety of specialised business applications by offering certification programmes in Oracle, Microsoft and OpenSource technologies. In addition, the company is a proud sponsor of SmartXchange, a not-for-profit Information and Communications Technologies cluster established to promote and support the region’s vision to be the technology hub of Africa.

Adapt IT was recently awarded the Annual Alec Rogoff BBBEE Empowerment award (Large Corporate category) by the Durban Chamber of Commerce and was also ranked 7th overall in the Financial Mail 2009 Top Empowerment Companies (TEC) survey.

The 2009 Alec Rogoff BBBEE Award profiles and recognizes transformation and innovative solutions home grown in KwaZulu-Natal. The objective is to award successful, effective and creative initiatives and projects that reflect ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking and individuals who have been prepared to take risks and go against the tide, with the overall aim of transforming the economy within the local and regional context.

The broad-based BEE rating for Adapt IT (conducted by Empowerdex) is very pleasing with the company categorised as a Level 3 contributor obtaining an overall score of 75.08. Its customers can now recognise 110% of the value of their spend with Adapt IT or its subsidiaries towards the procurement elements of their scorecards.

The strengths of the company are many and continue to grow. Together with its policy to continue to improve on its BEE status, Adapt IT has a strong acquisition and growth strategy, strong client retention and excellent IT skills. “We’ve been doing what we believe is right rather than running after metrics. We will continue to invest further in transformation, in particular, in the domain of skills development where we can add value to our employees, our customers and our community”, says Shabalala.

Shabalala added, “There are many ways to measure results. It’s about what you deliver, what you achieve, and what you leave behind. We pride ourselves on harnessing the power of IT to help grow our customer’s business today while helping to create a better South Africa for tomorrow.”