Value-added distributor Duxbury Networking is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2014. To mark the passing of this milestone, the company recently hosted an “open day” for its resellers and their customers at its Johannesburg head office complex.
Commenting on the significant changes that have occurred in the IT industry since his company’s inception in 1984, founder and CEO Graham Duxbury says the biggest difference is that where once high technology devices were sold only to corporates, they are now common-place in homes.
“Three decades ago our focus was on the enterprise market where the installation of wired corporate networks was one of our prime objectives, along with the manufacture and supply of our own brand of dial-up modems for the connection of networks, one to another, via telephone lines.
“Today, the emphasis is on meeting the growing number of private user demands in the corporate and home environments, fuelled by the BYOD [Bring Your Own Device] movement sweeping the globe, and the ubiquity of the Internet. Fast connection speeds and mobility are the new watchwords.”
Addressing the company’s evolution, Duxbury says that from its early beginnings it has grown steadily in size to around 120 employees. “We must be doing something right from an efficiency standpoint because our turnover and sales figures have multiplied many times more than our staff complement has increased.”
The Duxbury philosophy has always avoided the business model commonly associated with distribution – that of anonymous ‘box-moving’ on a large scale – in favour of establishing more intimate business and technical relationships with a select number of authorised dealers and resellers.
Duxbury emphasises the value of the company’s firmly-grounded technical support infrastructure characterised by Johannesburg- and Cape Town-based systems design, pre-sales and back-up teams led by chief technology officer Andy Robb.
Looking to the future, Duxbury says he’s on the look-out for the “next big thing” – a new technology breakthrough that will again revolutionise the industry as much as the World Wide Web did following its invention in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, and the first portable computers – called “luggables” – introduced in the early 1990s, that led to the proliferation of modern laptop and tablet computers.
“While many industry-watchers believe they can predict the future direction of the economy and that of the IT industry, Duxbury says they are no more predictable today than was the case in 1984.
“Today we hear of the ‘dire consequences’ of the falling rand on sales of imported goods and the negative influences of labour unrest on business confidence, but these pale almost into insignificance when compared to the commercial storms we had to weather in the mid-1980s.
“For example, the international fall-out from PW Botha’s ‘Rubicon’ speech in August 1985 and the subsequent departure of so many foreign companies from the local market created an environment in which it was extremely difficult to operate, much less forecast business trends. It was into this fire-storm that Duxbury Networking was born.
“Consequently, we’ve earned our stripes as a value-added distributor, having overcome some of the most difficult trading conditions SA has had to face in its recent history. As a result, we have a positive outlook on the future, confident that the more things appear to change, the more they actually stay the same.”
