Salt Essential IT (Pty) Ltd does not rest on its laurels. The company – celebrating its 25th birthday in March – has, yet again, made history by obliterating its own PMR.africa Diamond Arrow Awards winning streak.
The company has now been awarded three awards consecutively for four (4!) years. The award categories in which Salt has clinched the first spot and the coveted Diamond Arrow Awards are Cloud Service Providers, Data Centres, and IT Consulting Companies. No ICT company in the history of the business journal has even come close to this achievement. The 2022 awards bring Salt’s Diamond Arrow Awards tally to 20 in 10 years.
When the managing director, Sonja Coetzer is asked, “How do you do it?”, she responds with “It is never the how, it is always the why. ”
She continues, “Salt is honoured that our dedication to our clients through our client centric approach to delivery sees us winning these prestigious awards.Winning these awards 4 times in a row is truly a reason to celebrate.” “As we cannot enter, nominate or rate ourselves in this research, we are appreciative of the votes we receive, it makes the Why so much more worth it! The Why we are in business, is very important to us –we are in business to implement technology that optimises business and empowers people to effectively operate in a secure, productive, and sustainable manner .”
Coetzer explains that every Saltie embraces our mission and vision that is a living embodiment of our daily pursuit to deliver on our commitments. Salt’s evolution of the past 25 years has seen the company and its employees leading the market with solutions that disrupts industries in the Namibian market. Salt believes that enabled, empowered, and future-fit people are the most important asset a business can have to survive, grow and prosper.
“This is why we are in business. From inception we worked towards delivering technology that moved from being an architecture and systems provider to a partnership-based, human-centric business optimisation provider. And over the last 15 years, we’ve been continuously reinventing and refining this Why.”
“It is amazingly hard sometimes and we are not always successful the first time we try new technologies. Fortunately for our customers, by the time we recommend and implement tech in their space, they know we’ve thoroughly analysed and tested it, and we will do extraordinary effort to empower the people that will ultimately use it.”
Months before Covid-lockdowns in 2020, Salt was moving 4 thousand of users to cloud-computing services, but if ever Salt proved their fixation on future fitness, this was it. The company now serves 270 000 cloud-users at their customers across Namibia.
“Salt is a true team effort, and like most things, when the collective comes together greatness are delivered. Every Saltie’s dedication, commitment, and die-hard tenacity towards living and breathing our values every day is what makes all the difference at every customer.”
“The people at Salt enables your people to enable your business. That is our number one priority. And that’s why we are here.”
Sonja Coetzer - Managing Director
AI (Artificial Intelligence) is such a hot topic right now, with Chat GPT and Dalle taking the world by storm. But there is a darker side to AI that we as business owners and decision makers must be aware of.
I am convinced that if you are not yet harnessing the power of AI to protect your digital identities and assets, you will find yourself in a battle that you are not equipped to win.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to its knees, and it is by far not the greatest threat to humanity in history. We keep doing things the way we always have, not learning from our history and every time disaster strikes, we are unprepared.
In the previous millennia we could have blamed a lack of knowledge (not knowing that the cats ate the rats that carried the Yersinia pestis which caused the black plague,) as the root cause for the pandemic that decimated humanity's numbers. The root cause was actually the self-entitlement of the institutions in control of masses behaviour. Would the witch hunts still have taken place if the general population had been made aware of Yersinia pestis?
These are deep thoughts and much to ponder and speculate over, over a glass of Chardonnay.
The fact is we don’t have those excuses today. We know about Cybercrime. We are exposed to it on Social Media, from the media, that phone call telling you that you have won money that you did not even enter a competition for...
Just like with a disease, many people are taking all necessary precautions to avoid getting infected, but there are still many who refuse to admit that they can become infected. This behavior not only puts their own health at risk but also increases the risk of spread to others.
It is crucial to remember that, like a deadly virus, the effects of cybercrime are highly contagious, and anyone can become infected.
Traditional security is not enough. If you are not fighting AI with AI, you are heading to a gunfight with a knife.
Vanessa Maresch - Empowerment Specialist
