Only a few people have heard of Syspro. The company`s flagship product, Impact Encore, is better known than the company – although even it is often mistaken for an accounting package. Syspro actually develops enterprise software aimed at the local and international mid-market.

In September 1977, Chris Duff, then working for ICL on Stars, one of the first real-time accounting packages in the world, called his brother Phil, in Plymouth, England, and asked him if he wanted to move to South Africa and start a computer company. Knowing little about South Africa and nothing about computers, Phil arrived in November and started teaching himself Assembler programming. In September 1978 the two brothers officially formed a company, which later acquired the source code for Stars. They then set about rewriting the application in Cobol so that it could take advantage of an embryonic operating system called Unix. In the mid-eighties, a new integrated accounting system called Impact was launched.