Picture this: You visit a restaurant, and instead of your waitron whipping out a notebook and dutifully jotting down your order before returning to the kitchen to pop the docket on the pass, you were able to order directly from tableside through to the kitchen — reducing the risk of an order being incorrectly placed by up to 70%. Your waiter was there to assist you with information around the menu, while remaining on the floor to keep a watchful eye on you, topping up your glass without any desperate beckoning on your part.

Thanks to the vision of Dana Buys and Anna Groenewald, co-founders of TallOrder Solutions (previously CloudOne.mobi), this is now a reality. The local SME designs innovative cloud-based point of sale (POS) solutions for the retail, beauty and hospitality industries and is making big moves in the tech space. The company has caught the attention of investors with a view to accelerating technological transformation in Africa, having received R80m in funding to date.

And the best bit, they’re passionate about supporting the local technology industry and providing solutions that are tailor-made for South African businesses. Anna maintains that in order to design cloud solutions that operate optimally, one needs to take the local context into account. Africa’s internet is notoriously slow, unreliable and expensive, and therefore cloud solutions created by more developed markets don’t always work as well as they’re intended over here. The local landscape demands robust offline processing capacity and the POS system must be able to be isolated from the speed and availability of the underlying internet, which TallOrder has factored into its product design. Today, it’s considered a pioneer in cloud-based solutions for the Sub-Saharan African market.

As published on womenstuff.co.za