Organisation

Support Services

Services Offered

Additional services

Customer Profile

Company Profile

VCS (Pty) Limited is Seychelles leading Information Technology company, providing information system solutions to over 250 of the most successful national and international corporations. We manage and implement major information systems and IT projects which play a pivotal role in meeting our customers' strategic goals. Our mission is simply to be the best IT services provider in the region. Our goal is professional integrity and total customer satisfaction.

VCS (Pty) Ltd was incorporated on December 2nd, 1991 under the Government of Seychelles Companies Act 1972, and is registered as a private, proprietary company (Company number 1457)

After market research (in 1987) had indicated the need for a "high-quality" computer development firm in the region, the founder (Mr. Marc Houareau) started the development of a computer system designed specifically for the Travel Agency/Tour Operator market. This software system, marketed today under the name ASTRO® (Automated System for Travel, Reservation and Operations), was successfully installed at Mason's Travel (Seychelles) in 1988. To date the new Windows version has been successfully installed at numerous sites, including Travel Services Seychelles (a subsidiary of Ireland Blyth Ltd., Mauritius), National Travel Agency (Seychelles), Premier Holidays (Seychelles), Masons Travel (Seychelles) and Arabian Adventures (Dubai).

In 1989, VCS developed a new software product targeted at the tourism industry. Vista®, a comprehensive Hotel Management System, has been installed at all the major hotels in the Seychelles, including the prestigious Plantation Club Hotel & Casino, the official Miss World 1997 venue. This system includes all the extensive features of a large Hotel Management System, including modules for Reservations, Front-Office, Cashiering and Night Audit, Management (Statistics), Back-Office (Accounting), Inventory Control and Food & Beverage Control. The system has also been integrated with the popular "Micros" and RMS Touch point-of-sale system and interfaces with most popular telephone/PABX equipment, door-lock systems, accounting systems and others to further improve control and productivity in the applicable departments. Today, Vista® is one of the most modern Windows based Hotel Management Systems available on the market.

The company focused initially on the tourism market in the Seychelles. In 1992, having established itself as the leading player in this market, the company made the decision to expand its operations to serve other markets, particularly the banking, government and financial sectors.

VCS made history in 1993 when it became the first company in the Seychelles to export a "high-tech" product, the ASTRO® software system. This system was implemented at Arabian Adventures and Emirates Holidays, both companies being subsidiaries of the prestigious global carrier, Emirates Airlines, with headquarters in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

In the early '90s, VCS also signed distributor and reseller agreements with major firms in the IT industry. These included AT&T/NCR, Xerox, IBM, Compaq, Microsoft, Best Power Technology, and several others. These partnerships enable VCS to offer globally recognised products and worldwide warranties and provide an efficient after-sales service to its customers.

In 1997, reacting to growing demand, VCS formed a subsidiary company to market its software products internationally. The company VCSi (for VCS International) is based in London, UK and is responsible for sales and support of the Vista® and ASTRO® suites. During the 4th quarter of 1997, VCS installed its first Vista® system in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Organisation

A team of young, skilled professionals, with over 50 years of data processing experience, manages the company. Marc Houareau (MD) BSc Computer Science (USA), Wilson Quilindo BSc Computer Science (UK), Phil Southwell BSc Computer Science (RSA) and Christine Adeline BSc Computer Science (UK). A total of twenty-three systems analysts, programmers, computer technicians and support staff provide a wealth of computer skills and experience. In addition to their technical qualifications, the majority of our staff are either Microsoft Certified Professionals (MCPs) or Accredited Systems Engineers (ASEs). VCS is organised into six major divisions:

Customer Support

VCS has the technical expertise to keep abreast of this rapidly changing field. In this way we can provide not only the initial software and hardware services, but also the after-sales support that is critical to our industry.

Installation is complemented by full-service support and maintenance, available 24-hours a day, 365 days a year. VCS provides premium support to our clients through our Software Support Hot line. Our team of software analysts and system engineers are on call at any time via mobile phones. In addition, our clients can connect via modem and the Internet for on-line diagnosis and software updates.

Services Offered

Victoria Computer Services believes in providing a "total solution" to an organisation's IT needs. These range from the initial consultation, through the system design and implementation, to the site preparation and installation stages, and finally to the end-user training and commissioning of the system. Services include:

Our software support and equipment maintenance services include:

Directors

Mr. Marc Houareau - Managing Director
Mrs. Kathleen Mason
Mr. Wilson Quilindo>

Bankers

Barclays Bank PLC, P.O. Box 167, Victoria, Mahé. Seychelles
Nouvobanq (a subsidiary of Standard Chartered bank), P.O. Box 241, Victoria, Mahé, Seychelles

Auditors

Organisation

Support Services

Services Offered

Additional services

Customer Profile

Additional Services

Specialist departments within the company have been formed to meet the growing demand from our diverse client base. Among these are:

Banking

VCS is the only company installing and maintaining NCR ATM and credit card machines in the country. At present we are contracted to Barclays Bank and Nouvobanq (Standard Chartered) for their Automatic Teller Machines and nationally for Visa and Mastercard operations. We also provide software for the Bank of Baroda and software and hardware maintenance for the Seychelles Savings Bank and Habib Bank (Seychelles).

Cellular Phone Centre

When the cellular phone network was established in the Seychelles in 1996, VCS developed a close working relationship with Cable and Wireless (Seychelles) Ltd., the sole provider of telecommunication services in Seychelles. This in turn led to the formation of a separate division to supply and maintain cellular phones and PABX/Key systems. At present we are agents for Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Alcatel and Panasonic equipment.

Xerox Centre

VCS is the exclusive distributor of Xerox® products in the Seychelles. We stock colour and black and white copiers, laserjet printers, fax machines and engineering copiers and plotters. We supply consumables and spares, plus we service and maintain the complete range of Xerox digital solution equipment.

Internet Development

Our subsidiary company, Atlas (Pty) Ltd. is the sole Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the Seychelles. As an ISP we provide Internet connectivity and host web-sites developed by our R&D staff. Apart from our own site at www.seychelles.net\vcs, we develop and maintain Internet database interfaces to our software and many commercial and promotional sites, an example of which is the Seychelles tourism information site 'Essential Seychelles' at www.seychelles.net\Essenchelles. Atlas (Pty) Ltd also holds the top domain for Seychelles (.sc)

Insurance

VCS provides software and hardware support for IBM AS/400 systems for the only insurance companies in the Seychelles; H. Savy Insurance (Sey) Ltd. and State Assurance Corporation of Seychelles (SACOS).

Training

VCS operates professional Microsoft Training Certification in the heart of Victoria at our fully equipped VCS Training Centre. We cover basic, intermediate and advanced courses in most of the popular products, including, Windows 95, MS Word, MS Excel, MS Access, MS Outlook, Lotus, Novell, AutoCAD and others. In addition we provide training for our own mainline software products, Vista®, Hotel Management System and ASTRO® Tour Operator System and for the VCS business suite, including our Inventory control, Payroll, Personnel, Library, Bill of Entry and Maintenance packages.

Customer profile

VCS (Pty) Ltd. has acquired an excellent reputation for providing quality service and below is a partial list of our customers in the government, tourism, financial and other sectors:

Travel Industry

Government Sectors

Hotels

Financial Sectors

Software Development Strategy

Development Platform

PowerBuilder from Sybase is the product of choice for VCS’ client-server development. PowerBuilder is the most powerful Windows application development environment available today. Combining its integrated Client/Server architecture with powerful object-oriented programming tools, PowerBuilder is an open development environment that interfaces to best-of-breed software technologies. Backed by Sybase and incorporating the Watcom SQL or Sybase SQL database engine, PowerBuilder has captured the lion's share of the Client/Server front-end market world-wide. PowerBuilder works with all industry standard back-end databases such as Oracle, Informix or any ODBC compliant databases.

Internet Ready

Netscape Plug-Ins and Microsoft controls for ActiveX allow you to run PowerBuilder applications directly within a browser using Powersoft’s web.pb™ to build dynamic application servers for the Web PowerBuilder and its Internet features provide the tools that allow us to move dynamic, data driven business applications over to the World Wide Web.

Preferred Databases

Sybase SQL Anywhere and Sybase professional are effective, scalable DBMS solutions for single-user desktops, mobile laptop users, and networked workgroups of up to 500 users. VCS also uses Microsoft SQL, Oracle and other ODBC compliant databases to create SQL applications with all the relational features found in enterprise-calibre DBMS': referential integrity, stored procedures, triggers, self-tuning, query optimiser, row-level locking, and full on-line back-up and recovery.

Operating Systems

VCS uses cross-platform compilers to produce code for Windows 95, NT, Novell or Unix Platforms.

Data modelling

VCS utilise the S-Designor product exclusively as its Computer Aided Systems Engineering (CASE) tool. S-designor gives the ability to abstract data design into separate conceptual and physical levels allows fine-tuning of application's structure for a variety of purposes.

In the Conceptual Data Model, our programmers use business entities and their relationships with one another to describe the database in a non-technical manner. Since the CDM is not related to any specific DBMS, the data types assigned in it are non-DBMS specific as well. The CDM's intuitive notation, not only eases initial design, it also provides an effective means to communicate the database's structure to non-technical audiences.