LSD Information Technology has announced the merger of Knowledge Focus into its fold as of 1 January 2020.

The strategic integration is the result of a shared vision to unify and further strengthen competencies across key open source solution spaces.

With this merger, LSD hopes to explore new opportunities with their combined superpowers and will continue to deliver market-leading open-source solutions.

Stefan Lesicnik, CEO of LSD Information Technology, said of the merger: “We are really excited to no longer compete with the great team from Knowledge Focus but rather as colleagues to work with them and deliver great customer solutions based on open-source Elastic Stack and Kafka. Knowledge Focus’s open-source experience with Elastic and Kafka, combined with the LSD expertise around DevOps, Openshift, and Kubernetes, provides instant combined value for strategic solutions for our clients.”

Learn more about LSD Information Technology and open source technology at lsd.co.za.

Doug Moll, director at Knowledge Focus, said: “We are thrilled by what this means for the future of open source in South Africa. LSD has been a leader in this space for some time already and together with Knowledge Focus’s core search and analytics strengths will be even better positioned to support customers as they continue their journey into the world of open source. We are excited about the growth opportunities for ourselves but also for the depth and breadth of competencies that will be on offer to our customers.”

LSD and Knowledge Focus

LSD, a part of iOCO OpenDigital, was founded in 2001 by Stefan Lesicnik and has grown into the largest pure-play open-source developer in Africa in 19 years of operations with more than 30 open-source development resources.

The company delivers innovative open-source solutions featuring technologies from key partners including Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE and Redis.

Knowledge Focus was started in 2000 by Piet Dempsey and specialises in the delivery of search and analytics solutions. Having worked with most major search-based technologies, the company partnered with Elastic in 2015 as its core focus shifted to open source.

Since then, it has brought other open-source competencies on board including Kafka and Ansible. With a strong team of certified Elastic Engineers, the company offers expert consultation and support services to its customers and are also very active in the local Elastic community.