For players in the local IT space, recent partnerships and innovations are giving South Africa a firm shove in the direction of other technology leaders and innovators. Evidence of this is in the recent introduction of SynthaSite.

Developed by local businessman Vinny Lingham, it is said to be a user-friendly platform that can be used to create and publish websites, which could see him playing in the same sandpit as giants Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. The product uses an Ajax- based web-publishing system, features that will allow users to create blogs and websites without any programming expertise. Lingham has already released his online marketing tool called incuBeta.

Still in the software space, a partnership between Akeydor, a software house based in Greece, and local software company Sisonke Solutions will see the local contingent report R1.6 million in turnover by the end of the year. Sisonke, as the sole distributor for Akeydor's Activeworx suit of security products in this country, is confident it will achieve its financial targets as it is already in talks with several of South Africa's large banks. Activeworx is a security information event and log management software platform that includes monitoring, capturing, visualisation, correlation, reporting and logging of network security events. It will also assist Sisonke in growing its footprint with the rest of Africa.