Background and History

Altonet was established as IDWS, or Internet Design and Web Services, in 1998 by two young Internet entrpreneurs, as one of the first ISP’s.  It was established as an internet service provider, primarily to provide website design and hosting for small businesses.  It also began to take on subscribers for its dial-up services for email and internet which became the backbone of the company.  It was very successful in its uptake of subscribers, and the company grew from its humble beginnings.

In early 2005, the company took on an outside investor, and the business was transferred into a newly registered company called Alto Network Communications (Pty) Ltd.  The investor later sold its interest to a telecommunications company quoted on the ALTx of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

In February 2008, a director of that quoted company, Gareth Tudor, bought it’s shareholding, as it had decided that an internet service provider was not part of its core operations, and at the same time, the original shareholders sold most of their shares in Altonet to him.

In September 2008, the company name was changed to Altonet (Pty) Ltd in order to align the legal name with the trading name.  In October 2008, Mandla Madi, a business consultant, joined the compay and took up shares through his investment company, Jiri Investments (Pty) Ltd, and in November 2009, the original shareholders sold the balance of their shares leaving Gareth and Mandla (though Jiri) as the only shareholders.

Late 2008, Altonet was first introduced to Iron Mountain – a data backup and restore product set for servers (LiveVault) and for pc’s and notebooks (Connected).  Iron Mountain was then the largest storage company of customer information, both physical and digital, in the world. This began a long relationship with what are undoubtedly amongts the best products in that area of IT in the world.  In 2011, the digital storage business of Iron Mountain was bought by Autonomy – which was then the second largest pure software company in Europe, and based in Cambridge, U.K.  Autonomy was, in turn, bought by Hewlett Packard Company, or HP, in 2012, and LiveVault and Connected are now being intergrated into the HP Data Protector suite of products.  Altonet is now the lead reseller of HP Autonomy LiveVault and Connected in Southern Africa.  In addition, Altonet is now an HP hardware reseller, offering hardware at very competitive pricing.

Altonet is now run by Gareth, assisted as necessary by Mandla, and they are both passionate about providing the best data protection by cloud storage to South African entities, as well more bandwidth to a country that has been starved of good connectivity.  They are proud of the partnerships they have developed with HP Autonomy for data backup and restore, and Beachhead Solutions for encryption security – both essential cloud-based services in the a world of so much dependancy on digital media.  And they are both intensely grateful to HP Autonomy for backing up their laptops so efficiently – especially when one laptop crashed and the other was stolen!

And the name?  Ah well, two directors were having a good meal and enjoying a certain bottle of wine, and they started wondering what to call their company.  No prizes for guessing the name of the wine that prompted the new company name – all they had to do was to add the “net”!