It all started with a bug
After quitting their jobs in IT to set up their own company, CEO Danny Mackay and cofounders Keith Brown, Mark Damon and Nazeem Ebrahim knocked on doors for months without any luck or income. They eventually got their break when they tendered for the Transnet Y2K account and won it.
Set up in 1997, TSS is today one of the market leaders in the local IT industry, focusing on electronic procurement, software development and business consulting through subsidiaries such as Quadrem Africa and Inobits.
Its client base includes SA Airways, several JSE-listed mining firms and the Bahrain Oil Company. It has operations in SA, parts of Africa and in the Middle East. The group now produces revenues in excess of R250m/year and has a workforce of about 400.
For Mackay, this is a long way from Kimberley, where he was born and raised by a father who worked as a bus driver and a mother who was a factory worker. He started selling clothes as a teenager and has never looked back.
His IT career started in the 1970s at De Beers, where he worked as an IT operator. He worked his way up the ladder into a senior position and was later responsible for setting up IT infrastructure at Debswana’s Jwaneng mine in Botswana.
Though the business is expanding aggressively, Mackay believes local companies should do more to retain their spending on the continent. “We should try to redirect the money we spend offshore to our own economies. We export raw materials and buy finished products. We’re missing out on jobs that local manufacturing would have created if we had our own means of production.”
TSS is now looking to expand its operations into Nigeria.
It is partnering the SA government to provide hi-tech solutions to community development workers, and provides the social development department with software that helps improve service delivery.
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