Global IT investor takes stake in local software developer

Johannesburg, 4 March 2002 - Following hot on the heels of some interesting worldwide investments, specialist IT investor Treacle Venture Partners has bucked the trend and has acquired a 25% stake in a local IT company.

SourceCode Technology Holdings, which focuses on workflow and integration software, has also attracted the attention of Microsoft in the US.

K2.net is the company's principal product. It is a rapid process integration toolset with built-in process logic on the Microsoft platform. The product can assist a company with complex application integration and workflow management issues to help rapidly document and re-engineer a process. Having integrated k2.net with the applications in the process, SourceCode can obtain detailed management information on all activities in the process, allowing for continuous process improvement.

Adriaan van Wyk, Lenz le Roux and Olaf Wagner established SourceCode in 1997 as a software development house. K2.net was launched in 2001.

“The product has done well on the local market.” Says van Wyk, SourceCode MD “Since the latest version was registered eight months ago, the product has been taken up by some of the big five consulting firms as well as the likes of Siemens Business Services, AST and Nedcor. We have also been working closely with Microsoft in the local market and we will be launching our latest version of the product in conjunction with Microsoft on March 15.”

SourceCode has been invited to meet with the Microsoft development team headquartered in Redmond, Seattle. This is encouraging news as traditionally the local IT industry has not been renowned for developing unique software. "We believe that SourceCode could well break out of that mould” says Rudolf Pretorius of Treacle Venture Partners.

The company has already set up an independent distributor for the Asian markets, Intiqua, a company based in Singapore that will assist in establishing SourceCode South-East Asia. The San Francisco-based arm of Intiqua will be handling the initial roll-out of the product in the US markets in conjunction with SouceCode locally.

“From here we need to keep developing our technology, both locally and by working in conjunction with the Microsoft R&D team in Redmond. This is one of the reasons that we have been successful so far,” concludes van Wyk.