Johannesburg, 29 Sep 2004
Barone, Budge & Dominick (BB&D), which celebrates its 20th anniversary this month, has come a long way from its humble beginnings in a house in the Johannesburg suburb of Orange Grove back in September 1984.
But while it has blossomed from just three partners - Sandra Barone, Tom Budge and Ralf Dominick - to a firm now employing around 230 people in Johannesburg and Cape Town, the focus has remained solidly on software development.
"From the time we started operating out of Sandra Barone`s house right up until now we`ve basically stuck to our knitting, designing and developing software" says Ralf Dominick, one of the founders.
Significantly, very few of BB&D`s early peers are around today, at least not in the same format. NCR became NDS, Persetel became Comparex which is now Business Connection Group, IBM became ISM and then IBM again, Burroughs became Unisys and then Unidata and then Unisys again... the list goes on.
Clients have also changed a fair bit over the years. Trust Bank became Bankorp and then Absa. Barclays Bank became First National Bank and then Rand Merchant Bank. Clients that haven`t changed their names include Metro Cash & Carry, Wesbank and Reuters.
To put BB&D`s origins and longevity into perspective, it was formed just a year after Dimension Data. Both companies have grown into leaders in their fields over the past two decades.
In BB&D`s case, once the Orange Grove house became too small, the intrepid trio and a handful of staff moved to the 46th floor of the Carlton Centre when the Johannesburg CBD was the place to be. They remained and flourished there until 1992 when a move was made to the old SA Gold Coin Exchange premises on Jan Smuts Avenue in Parktown.
When that space wasn`t enough, another move was necessary to the current location in Houghton where the company has grown in leaps and bounds since the mid-1990s.
Looking back over the past 20 years, which has encompassed most of the development of the IT industry as we know it today, Dominick makes the point that back in the 1980s the focus was on technology while now it is much more on business solutions.
"The challenge back then was to connect systems together and get technology to work, but today you can plug almost anything into anything. The big challenge now is to implement business solutions - it`s a very different focus partly because technology has evolved so much," he says.
As Dominick points out, it`s not that many years ago that no less a luminary than Bill Gates said 640kb of memory would be more than anyone would need.
As for BB&D`s highlights since 1984, there`ve been many, including:
* Winning a deal through Burroughs to prepare training documentation for the US armed forces` Ingres database;
* Developing the E-Post architecture for Australia Post;
* Developing Decision Support Information Platforms for First National Bank in SA and Deutsche Bank in Germany;
* Acquiring Foundation Technologies in Cape Town;
* Implementing Nedcor`s Alpha Project; and
* Implementing a fibre optic driver for the Development Bank of Southern Africa.
Looking to the future, Dominick warns that any predictions are based on past knowledge and could easily be flawed, especially if a disruptive innovation comes along to upset the technology apple cart.
"The transistor was developed in the 1950s and was the forerunner of the microprocessor which has revolutionised the world. Who knows what`s around the corner. Biological computing, perhaps, with computers using biological circuits instead of electrical ones," he says.
"While the future`s unclear, one thing`s for certain, change will continue and we could land up with unimaginable computing power. Micro nano-technology, wearable computers, materials that change colour - there`s a lot happening right now that`s going to change how we do things in the future."
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