Echo South Africa
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Echo South Africa
As South Africa's first vendor neutral service provider, we are passionate about finding and leveraging leading infrastructure technologies to offer agnostic network and cloud solutions.
We have in-depth knowledge of technologies, business needs, and the South African corporate environment. Combining these competencies, we constantly innovate our services to meet business requirements. We achieve this by infusing technology with business networks, maximising our clients' profits by lowering their operational costs. Integrating multiple carriers and providers, we are able to bring the very best services to our clients via a converged multi-carrier network.
The advantage we bring is the ease of dealing with a single aggregator of services, who both understands the landscape and is able to offer best price and blend of services. We simplify the complexities clients experience when aggregating infrastructures.
Echo Service Provider was founded in June 2010 by Grant Thom, Angus MacRobert and Anthony Southgate. The cementing force behind the team's vision was their shared recognition that businesses in South Africa had a real need for choice when selecting an internet or network service provider, but contracting with and managing multiple providers was time-consuming, costly and complex.
The timing was perfect for Echo to enter the market as a vendor neutral aggregator, strongly client-focused, and providing internet and other value-added services to the market in an innovative way that significantly simplified the complexity involved in multi-vendor engagements. We have successfully continued with this delivery model, adding cloud, security, managed networks and other offerings to our portfolio over the years.
The heart of our business is our staff, and the passion and enthusiasm they have for their work continues to make Echo the company people aspire to join or partner with.
Each member of our team has unique experience and proficiencies, with many having spent over a decade in the ISP industry. Our highly adept engineers boast a number of Cisco qualifications, including CCIE and CCNP, as well as Fortinet security certifications. Our projects, operations, finance, sales and other resources are equally skilled and qualified in their particular areas. We exist to connect everyone, anywhere and we are bonded by our drive to make that happen.
Grant Thom
Grant is CEO and a co-founder of Echo, with in excess of 20 years' ISP experience. Grant spent a large part of his professional career at Internet Solutions, where he managed many of the blue chip organisations and helped not only in the growth of IS, but also in developing and delivering on strategies for these South African-based blue chip organisations.
Angus MacRobert
Angus is an executive director and shareholder of Echo. Angus studied at the University of Oxford as well as the University of Cape Town and is a qualified Chartered Accountant with extensive experience in the ISP arena. His roles include CEO at Internet Solutions and Vox, and tenures with Dimension Data, Persetel, and Capita Partners.
Craig MacPherson
Craig joined Echo as the operations executive for South Africa in 2018, becoming managing executive in 2021, and COO in 2023. Prior to that, Craig has more than 20 years' experience in various senior operational roles across cloud/hosting, OSS and platform services. Craig has strong technical expertise in the areas of cloud computing and managed services.
Neil Dragt
Neil joined Echo as head of product development in 2016, appointed as the executive of innovation in 2018. He has a Bachelor of Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the University of Pretoria, and over 20 years' experience in the ISP industry, fulfilling several senior roles in innovation and product development. Neil is also an AWS-certified solutions architect.
Ant Southgate
Ant is a co-founder of Echo, with in excess of two decades experience in the ISP industry. Ant studied engineering at Wits and has been involved in the development of many ISP business units, including hosting, security, and cloud solutions.
Colin Chifamba
Colin is the technical manager at Echo, serving over 10 years with the company. Colin studied at Wits Business School and is highly adept in the ISP sphere, racking up an impressive number of endorsements and certifications, including Cisco.
Bruce MacRobert
Bruce is a non-executive director at Echo, with over two decades experience in managerial and directorship positions. Bruce studied a Bcom at the University of Cape Town and is a certified Chartered Accountant.
Founded in 1984, Ethos pioneered South African private equity, concluding the first private equity-led acquisitions in the country.
Ethos is pursuing a growth vision; evolving from being the leading private equity manager in South Africa to becoming the leading alternative asset manager in Africa. As such, since 2016 Ethos has launched a Mid Market Fund, a Mezzanine Fund, and an Ai Fund.
Furthermore, in 2016, Ethos launched Ethos Capital, a permanent capital vehicle listed on the JSE, designed to offer investors long-term capital appreciation by investing in a diversified portfolio of unlisted investments managed by Ethos.
Ethos seeks to leverage its understanding of all sub-Saharan African markets to target companies best positioned to benefit from the region’s unique growth dynamics. As an active investor, Ethos has capitalised on its experience of owning businesses across a variety of investment, economic and political cycles to maximise value post-investment and generate superior returns.
Echo falls under the Ethos Mid Market Fund, managed by an exceptional team.
Edward Pitsi
Edward is the Managing Partner of the Ethos Mid Market Fund and is also a member of the Ethos Executive Committee. Edward holds a Masters of Commerce degree from the University of Pretoria and an MBA from INSEAD. He is also a member of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants.
Tabane Matheolane
Tabane is Principal at Ethos Mid Market Fund. Tabane holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Accounting from the University of Cape Town and a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Actuarial Mathematics from the University of Pretoria. She is also a member of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants.
A key component of what Echo has to offer is partnerships with the best providers, and with this in mind we have collaborated and worked closely with a variety of partners and vendors, each one adding distinct value to our portfolio of services. Along with these partnerships, we provide industry-leading technology offerings to our clients, ensuring the highest quality of service.
While we have vast network coverage and a basket of exceptional solution offerings to deliver across and around that network, it is how we do what we do that makes the difference.
Our engineers, project managers, operations and other staff boast some of the top technical and business qualifications in the market, but it is their attitude and aptitude that sets them apart.
That is why you will find Echo so heavily invested in learnership programmes for young talent, and continual mentorship and development of our existing people. We make it our mission to find people with the right values and drive to succeed, and invest in those individuals as they grow their skills and qualifications from basic to advanced competence, alongside our more experienced resources.
Come and visit our offices and experience the Echo difference.