Our "Sunny Skies and Software - Local is Lekker" conference was well attended and well received. So I guess we'll do it again next year. As software advocates, we wanted to shine the spotlight on local software to show that there is plenty of world-class tech being built locally by smart and talented people. Thanks to all who attended and participated for a day of fun in the sun! Click here to see the Programme. Click here to see more photos.



To me, the common thread that emerged from the conference is that the local software industry is still struggling rather than thriving. One reason may be that, while we may know something about technology and software, we still have a lot to learn about marketing and business. Another reason may be that we are still struggling to overcome the stigma that was once attached to being South African. Perhaps we need to first believe we can be, and then strive to become world-class software companies.

I was recently chatting to Estelle Trengrove, a lecturer from Wits' JCSE, who is doing research on the adoption of standards like CMM by the local software industry. JCSE encourages companies who do software engineering to adopt international standards as a benchmark against which they can compare their quality to the rest of the world. But it occurred to me that customers do not yet expect software companies to put a mark of quality on their products.

One of the software companies who spoke at our conference has joined the "Proudly South African" campaign, which certainly aspires to raise expectations about the quality of local products and services - or at least enforces a code of conduct. Still, the company has found it difficult to overcome perceptions by local companies that local software is of an inferior quality to international software.

For me, the acid test of software quality and marketing success will be whether customers who compare local software to international software choose to buy local. This is a question we always ask in our enterprise software survey. About 23% of survey respondents buy locally developed software. We have a long way to go.