Obsidian Systems is leveraging its near 25-year market experience to ensure businesses secure ROI in cloud services, amid increasing business uncertainty fuelled by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. From its modest beginnings in dabbling with Unix and Linux systems, the business (driven by engineering experts) has gone on to successfully explore and extract the advantages offered by Open-Source technology infrastructure.

Open-Source technology has evolved and today, the focus for businesses in South Africa is on cloud service adoption. Obsidian has successfully entrenched its value proposition as an essential technical services partner within numerous verticals, including the highly influential financial services industry.

Muggie van Staden, MD of Obsidian Systems

“Luckily most of the financial organisations in South Africa are customers of ours in some way or form.  As open source expanded, so did we. That's where we are now, we are a group of companies, about one hundred and sixty employees. It’s a great fun story from four guys who decided to sell hardware to where we are today,” says Muggie van Staden, MD, Obsidian Systems.

Van Staden believes one of the company’s inherent strengths is the fact that it has experts with experience and who are ahead of the curve when it comes to identifying trends and technologies. This helps to position the company strategically to service businesses interested in open source and more recently in cloud services adoption. Van Staden acknowledges the role of its experts in identifying the powerful opportunity that resides in cloud and the evolution of cloud technology.

Another quality the company possesses naturally, in addition to its organic growth and its ability to partner with the right ally at the right time, is its agility. Obsidian has grown in leaps and bounds, become hugely influential and renowned as a technical force to be reckoned with in open source, cloud and next-generation digital architecture solutions – but it has always retained a sense of its own identity. “That is certainly one of the things…we’ve had acquisition proposals, several of them, through the years. Not sure if it’s luck or stupidity, but we’ve always managed to say ‘no’ … we’re quite stubborn about who we want to partner with. We like being able to manage ourselves, we like to do that within the group,” Van Staden said.

This sense of ‘self’ within the company and security in who it is, why it exists and what value it offers the market has enabled it to ‘absorb’ the fallout of change, mergers, acquisitions and the movement of service providers and technology vendors.