Mezzanine is a purpose-led organisation that accounts for sustainability across three dimensions – economic, environmental and social.

Economic Perspective:

As a for-profit business we believe that the economics of what we need to be both scalable and sustainable. The emphasis is not the redistributing value but creating new shared value.  For as long as the value that we create and deliver to our customers are more than what we capture (monetise) we are creating shared value, which is both sustainable and scalable.

Environmental:

Mezzanine create, deliver and capture value in an environmental conscious way with several of our digital solutions contributing towards a more accountable ecosystem of stakeholders within the respective sectors where we operate.

Social Perspective:

We get deeply involved in societal challenges and look for ways in which digital technology can assist in solving them. Majority of our solutions can be viewed as system strengthening solutions impacting several upstream and downstream stakeholders participating in a value chain. During the design and development of our solutions we focus on ensuring that there is an incentive for all stakeholders to participate. As a consequence there is a benefit, directly or indirectly, across the value chain with the exception of stakeholders that contribute towards dilution of value for their own benefit.

While Open Source may seem free it’s not. There is a technology stack and a lot of people who are behind the curtain looking after that technology so that it runs. The difference is that by virtue of its very nature, open source isn’t customised for particular needs and its functionality is often limited. You might have a very complex problem to solve in a specific society. Using Open Source will very likely not be able to meet those particular needs. In addition to this, Mezzanine offers a fully managed service with 24hour support and very high levels of uptime thanks to our proprietary server environment, Helium. Your data is much safer with us and your solution will deliver more effectively and efficiently than any Open Source solution can boast.

No. Mezzanine is a for-profit digital technology solutions organisation that specialises in mobilising societal change in areas of need across Africa.

Mezzanine is a subsidiary of Vodacom. We were a sexy tech start-up and sold a majority stake in our business to Vodacom a few years back in order to obtain the global support and scale we need to bring our solutions to more people in Africa. Our technology is however compatible with any mobile network provider so we don’t only work within the Vodacom network. We seek out the best mobile network partners in the countries in which we operate for the purpose of the solution we are offering.

Mezzanine has worked with a variety of donor and aid organisations, government departments and national government bodies as well as private and commercial enterprises. Take a look here for a view of our live projects across Africa.

Yes! We are bringing all sorts of glory to Europe, Australia and Asia right now in terms of agriculture which relies heavily on Africa for collaboration and food security anyway. It’s a glocal world of tech!

Mezzanine hosts all solutions on Helium, our proprietary server that sits on-soil in South Africa. We can also build slave servers supported by Heliums on-soil in any other South African country where we actively run our solutions.

The truth is that Mobile solutions are just far more effective, efficient and cost-saving that building a fixed infrastructure. Mobile phone penetration across Africa is exponential and our goal with any of our solutions is to effect scale so that we can build productive societies as far and wide as mobile technology can reach. Standard desktop infrastructure isn’t as agile or cost-effective as the power of mobile.

Yes. This is one of our unique selling points. Thanks to Helium’s advance technological capability we can plug into ERPs or Databases that exist to connect that information to our solutions.

We are pretty speedy. We have deployed some of our solutions in a couple of months. However, this is all dependent on how many partners we need to work with in the value chain, how many approvers there are and what our targets entail. We can move as fast as our customers want us to move.

The products we sell have already been built and are in use by many customers – but when we deploy a new instance for a new customer, we first seek to understand your particular needs, and how to customise for your own geographical hierarchy and web user roles. For example, some countries use Regions and Districts, but you might need Circuits and Provinces – these small details can be accommodated to ensure users really understand the product within your own locality. These changes are usually made once off during the set up of the instance, whereas other features such as uploading new districts, can be done ad hoc during use of the product. Reach out to our sales advisors if you have specific questions about any of our products.

Mezzanine uses its own bespoke language so that our software developers can code on our proprietary server, Helium.

We have a dedicated support centre responsible for ensuring any issues are speedily resolved. We have excellent turnaround times and pride ourselves on being renowned for the level of support we provide our customers.

There is no such thing as a manage solution that doesn’t have built-in support. We empower our customers by upskilling their first line support so that we can provide second and third line support through our 24/7 friendly helpdesk and our knowledgeable helpdesk advisors.

We take support seriously, and have measurable Service Level Agreements to ensure we meet quality standards.

Problems escalated by customers have preset response times:

• Priority 1 (Critical) issues are resolved within 24 hours
• Priority 2 (Major) faults are fixed within 16 business hours
• Priority 3 (Minor) issues are resolved within 80 business hours

Our platform also has a 99% uptime guarantee, giving you the peace of mind that technical issues will not hinder your workforce.

Yes! We are able to train your developers to code on Helium. We can offer the hosting expertise that Helium provides as a service without you needing to purchase a managed solution from us.

Yes! Our developer team is happy to assist your developers in adding bespoke builds to our products or creating your own solutions from scratch.

She’s called Helium 🙂

Helium is proprietary cloud-based server environment located in Stellenbosch, the heart of tech development and the silicon valley of South Africa. Click here to take a look at everything that she can do.

Yes. With the number of beneficiaries and users we aid in obtaining access to various products and services, we can’t afford to rely on things like signal and data to make our solutions available. We have developed methods of ensuring that no matter where somewhere is in Africa, they can use Mezzanine solutions without access to data or a 3G tower.

Some of them are yes. To download MyFarmWeb from the Apple app store, click here. For MyFarmWeb on the Google Play store, click here.

The user or beneficiary to whom the data integrally applies. This could be a patient or a farmer. While the customer might have access to data they only see this data from a normalised perspective. This enables them to draw insights and analyse information from packs of data but they cannot see the intrinsic details of each user.

We do but we can take you through a process of handing over all your data and source code if you have the facility and resources to manage it. You can also take over the management of your solution while still hosting it on our proprietary server environment. We work with you to find new homes for products that might have achieved their objectives or run their course of the contract.

This is why we built our own server environment which meets the highest international security protocols. So we could assure you, our customers, beneficiaries and users, of the protection and safe-guarding of your data. Click here to read more about how we do this through Helium.