Netsurit’s CIO wins award for SaaS product
Rapid innovation in the face of the sudden workplace disruption; Louis de Klerk has won a Globee® IT World Award in the bronze category for Chief Technology Officer of the Year for his development and bringing to life of the Netsurit Productivity Monitor.
The Globee Awards are the world’s premier business awards consisting of eleven award programs – IT World Awards® being one of them – honouring organisations of all types and sizes and the people behind their success. The Globee Awards recognise outstanding achievements and performances in businesses worldwide and nominations are reviewed by industry peers and experts.
The IT industry’s premier excellence awards program honours achievements in every facet of the information technology industry. There is no other industry-wide recognitions program like this.
Louis de Klerk is the CIO at Netsurit.
In February 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a month prior to South Africa’s first hard lockdown, Louis projected that the lockdown implementation strategies seen in China and Italy at that time would spread world-wide. Requiring most people to work from home – significantly decreasing the visibility that management would have over people’s productivity and work habits.
Over the course of a month Louis researched and developed a minimal viable product (Netsurit Productivity Monitor, or NPM) that would monitor people in an ethical way that is business-relevant, yet still provide organisations with relevant insights into people’s work patterns regardless of where they work.
The Netsurit Productivity Monitor is all about building and maintaining trust between employees and management. NPM is designed to better understand trends and capacity within a company as well as to look out for potential burnout candidates, encouraging a healthy work-life balance for everyone in the company.
Keeping privacy and trust in the forefront, NPM only gathers relevant information, such as: Login Name/ Account name; Email Address; Department; Job Title; Line Manager; Date, Time and participants/ recipients of meetings and emails, and lastly; Time spent on any Business Applications & Websites.
By April 2020 Louis had the NPM solution deployed to 4 paying customers. With the MVP successful, Louis started to mature the solution into a full SaaS product, coordinated and contributed the creation of marketing and sales collateral, and by August Netsurit had 9 paying customers, monitoring over 1,600 users. The months that followed showed that NPM was also very effective at introducing Netsurit to new customers – allowing us to sell not only NPM, but our other IT services too.
Louis’ achievement was in predicting a specific need that many companies would develop, and quickly creating and selling a solution that our existing customer would derive much needed value from – and be ready exactly when the need for the solution would peak.
Louis worked alone on the NPM solution (research, development, operations, sales, support, training, etc.) until the MVP was proven a success, then he convinced the rest of Netsurit that NPM was something that should be invested in. Louis was the visionary, evangelist, architect, developer, salesperson, and support that drove the initial success of NPM – drawing on various fields of experience from his 25-year career.
Due to Louis’ initiative and the success of NPM, Netsurit has now extended its range of services to developing and selling SaaS products – diversifying our customer base and service offering away from our traditional people-centric services to a much more scalable SaaS model.
Globee Awards: What are the IT World Awards?
Welcome to the IT industry’s premier excellence awards program IT World Awards® honouring achievements in every facet of the information technology industry. There is no other industry-wide recognitions program like this. This annual industry and peers program now has several major sections making this one of the most and only complete IT recognitions and achievements award program in the world.
All winners in this category: Chief Technology Officer of the Year | IT Cloud / SaaS
GOLD GLOBEE® WINNER
Webscale | Santa Clara, CA USA | No customer has fallen victim to a cyber-attack ever. | Dr. James (Jay) Smith
SILVER GLOBEE® WINNERS
Fastly | SAan Francisco, CA USA | Fastly’s Tyler McMullen pushes industry-wide innovation, collaboration at the edge | Tyler McMullen
Ittihad International Investment | Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates | Winning the SAP Cloud Transformation Award | Gigi Mathew Thomas
BRONZE GLOBEE® WINNERS
Netsurit | Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa | Enabling businesses globally to monitor productivity of a remote workforce. | Louis de Klerk
Click2Cloud India Pvt.Ltd | Nagpur, India | Most active contributor in Alibaba’s Most Valued Professional(MVP). | Rupal Shirpurkar
Comply Exchange | Kingswood, Banstead, Tadworth, United Kingdom | Industry Innovator for Information Reporting & Withholding |
IT Support LA | Los Angeles, CA USA | Ability to adapt to market shifts
Student Shelter In Computers | Lahore, Pakistan | Abbas Shahid Baqir Youngest Entrepreneur Wins Arab Cyber Security Awards | Abbas Shahid Baqir
TAC Security | Mumbai, Maharashtra, India | TAC Security protects Fortune 500, large enterprises and governments globally | Trishneet Arora
