logo

Partnerships

About our partnerships

We have aligned ourselves with South Africa's acknowledged and emerging leaders in telecommunications service provision. These partnerships include:

Internet Solutions (IS), South Africa's acknowledged leader in corporate Internet access services since 1993. IS, a division of Dimension Data, has an industrial strength, high performance, secure and extremely reliable private network spanning the country with multiple redundant links. Multiple interconnected gateways connect this private network to Europe, USA, Australia and the East, providing outstandingly reliable and fast international throughput over redundant, international fibre and satellite links. IS also has a highly regarded track record in innovation, having introduced scores of added value services that are unique in the ISP industry. Because of this service excellence, reliability and innovation, IS is the chosen supplier to over 10,000 of South Africa's leading business organisations, and hosts on their backbone over 5,000 web based business services, many of them household names like banks, insurance companies and major industrial groups. Over 85% of South Africa's internet based business transactions take place on their robust, industrial quality backbone and hosting environment.

Telkom, South Africa's established fixed line provider. Because of their many years as a monopoly, Telkom holds the lion's share of fixed lines and owns all of the national and local exchanges in this country. SAI is a major reseller of Telkom Internet services including both the ADSL line services and SAIX Internet bandwidth.

MetroConnect - the eThekwini Metro-wide fibre network is now available for use by businesses, and SAI Futurenet, along with Internet Solutions were the first services providers licenced to resell these services to our clients.

Airband - who are emerging as the premier wireless connectivity provider, and who use highly reliable meshed network infrastructure to cover not only the greater metropolitan Durban area but reach as far as Pietermaritzburg in the west and Ballito / Umdloti in the north. As Airband increases its national coverage, SAI will continue to expand this partnership

SAI's own private network infrastructure, which is linked to IS via high speed LAN technology, is based on world class hardware and software (Cisco, Intel, Dell, HP/Compaq). We also have secondary Diginet links to Telkom's SAIX infrastructure.

All of these relationships are based on long term, formal partnerships with leading companies with excellent reputations for service quality and reliability.

Why use SAI when you could deal direct with our partners?

There are many very relevant reasons:

More appropriate range of supporting services, better suited to our type of client
While sales director of Internet Solutions, SAI CEO Des Ramsay, specifically created the VCP (Value Channel Partnership) program because he recognized that IS were not geared to provide the wide range of supporting services that smaller businesses with small or no IT departments may need.

IS has been organized to deal efficiently with large national companies, with big, multidisciplinary IT departments. To keep their costs competitive, they have stripped out services irrelevant or unnecessary to these larger companies, including, amongst many others:

As they started dealing with smaller to medium sized businesses, they found that considerable friction was being created when these companies expected and depended on supporting services that were not there.

Likewise, Telkom has many millions of clients and it can be very frustrating to deal through their call centre to register, track and follow up on faults. By using SAI, this is taken care of through our direct links into the Telkom support and service infrastructure.

SAI has set up our supporting services directly to address the requirements of your type of business.

No "finger pointing"
Dealing with several service providers, third parties and consultants to provide an integrated service can become difficult for even a large business to handle, and can become a nightmare and cost drain for a smaller business.

Effectively the client can see SAI as an "integrator" of services from any or all of our partners, and we take responsibility for supporting the whole solution, and for dealing with these upstream providers.

Enhanced and more appropriate product range than any one of our SP's can provide to SMEs
Because the products that these larger partners offer are often focussed on larger national corporations, smaller to medium sized companies often find gaps, especially at the lower end. For example, some of the entry level IS products can be too expensive for the smaller enterprise to justify.

One of the roles of the SAI is to take the most suitable of these products and supplement them with additional services and products more suited to smaller businesses.

For example, SAI supplements the IS range with a wide selection of entry level services - which allow our clients to start small and grow without ever having to switch service providers.

More relevant and appropriate business interactions
Being large organizations themselves, IS, Telkom and eThekwini municipality recognise that smaller and medium sized businesses would get more personalized, empathetic and relevant advice, guidance and support from a similar sized business.

A company like SAI is not only much more familiar with business problems faced by these smaller businesses, but also better understands the constraints and challenges posed by the geographic regions in which we both operate.

More flexibility
IS, Telkom and eThekwini municipality work on a large scale, dealing with large users in a standardised way. The type of business they run does not allow for many individual highly differentiated business agreements and relationships. Working with a smaller regionally based service provider with local management allows each client to be treated with a great deal more individuality and flexibility.

SAI is always prepared to consider our clients unique contractual requirements and has the flexibility to make quick decisions to accommodate these. Our larger partners are often inflexible in their contractual arrangements.

More leverage with the large service provider partners
SAI is a very large IS user - one of Durban's largest and one of SA's largest resellers. The leverage we can exert on IS on behalf of our clients, either as a group, or on behalf of a single client, is far greater due to the combined weight of all of our clients' usage.

Similarly with Telkom, we have relationships at a high managerial level at our disposal, as well as direct access to the Telkom installation and support systems. We can get things done more quickly and more easily than any one of our smaller business clients could do without us.

Closer ties at executive level
Small and medium business often prefer to deal with the owners of a business directly, to transact with the head office of their suppliers and to feel as if they are important to their suppliers. This is difficult to achieve with a supplier like IS or Telkom, when they are remotely situated, and have pressing priorities with clients hundreds of times larger than a small business. Also, being a large IS and Telkom client, SAI deals directly with IS at a director level, and with Telkom at a Regional Management level.

SAI is part of the BassettRamsay Group
The BassettRamsay Group was specifically established to provide a wide range of business services to small and medium enterprises.

As part of this multifaceted Small Business Services group, we have the ability to bring additional services to bear whenever needed.

No cost disadvantage, only potential savings (best of both)
All of these advantages are available at no additional cost. IS VCPs and Telkom resellers are contractually bound not to charge higher rates for the respective product ranges then those being charged directly by the original suppliers.

Also, by creating solutions from products selected from all of our partners ranges, more cost effective overall pricing can be achieved.