e-Skills Academy boosts technical capability

Robert Sussman, joint managing director at Integr8 IT, together with communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri.

The education institution was officially opened recently by President Thabo Mbeki and communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri.

Integr8 IT is reputed to be South Africa's largest privately owned national BEE ICT network integration and infrastructure management specialist and it was tasked with enhancing the academy's infrastructure and its ability to meet an increasing demand for e-learning.

The large-scale project involved one of the most advanced and sophisticated IT infrastructures of its type in the country, including server and security hardware and software, LAN and WAN.

The company was also tasked with the delivery of general IT support that encompassed installation, configuration and trouble shooting on routers, servers, desktops, laptops, firewalls and Microsoft operating systems, databases and applications to support more than 250 students at a time.

“In addition to high levels of reliability and redundancy in order to avoid any downtime during student training, the academy also required a high-performance data-storage and backup infrastructure,” explains Dan Ellappa, CEO at The e-Skills Academy of South Africa (Pty) Ltd.

According to Ellappa the academy's core business requirements combined with the level of skills necessary for the project made this installation unique.