Dube Tradeport creates new options for South Africa’s SMMEs

Budgeting and reporting software company IDU has chosen KwaZulu-Natal’s Dube Tradeport to launch its new cloud-based product for small and medium enterprises, citing the quality and competitive pricing of Dube iConnect’s infrastructure-as-a-service offering.

“Making our core product idu-Concept available in the cloud enables us to reach a whole new market of small- and medium-sized businesses,” says Margie Whitten of IDU KZN. “They all need a solution to the problems they encounter with spreadsheet-based budgeting and reporting – but don’t have the resources for a major capital project to do an on-site implementation.”

By offering idu-Concept in the cloud, says Whitten, “we can offer it for an affordable monthly fee per user instead of as a single large project. It also means that both we and our clients are free of all the hassles of maintaining servers and other hardware – it makes the whole process easier and more cost effective.”

IDU has access to the full resources of Dube iConnect’s data centre through its reseller partner DCData, says Whitten. “Moving idu-Concept into the cloud couldn’t have been easier – we got a password, installed the database on their servers and there it was. Leaving us to concentrate on client delivery and not worry about the environment again.

Dube Tradeport, based around the King Shaka Airport north of Durban, is a flagship project of KwaZulu-Natal’s Department of Economic Affairs and Tourism. Dube iConnect’s R100m investment in server and network technology is just one aspect of a 60-year master plan that will see the development became a major trade and logistics hub.

“The quality of their infrastructure and services is superb,” says Whitten. “We are confident that their fully replicated data centre and disaster recovery service means we never have to worry about the stability of the environment in which our product runs.”

IDU CEO Kevin Philips says any company already running an ERP system like Pastel, Accpac or Syspro could be up and running with idu-Concept within days. The cloud version includes standard financial budgeting and reporting as well as sales budgeting and reporting.

The power of idu-Concept is delivering financial information, both in terms of capturing budgets and reporting actuals and variances to non-financial users. Until now this has been a luxury only the large corporates have been able to enjoy due to the high entry cost to the environment. The cloud solution removes this barrier to entry ensuring that the SME market can benefit from this truly empowering tool.