Business View Caribbean
9
and the partner has to be a respectable organization,
such as a private auditing company, so I’m looking for
a partner. The first person to call me by seven o’clock
tomorrow morning will be the partner that I will select.’
“It was a bold move, but I got a call at twenty to seven
the following morning, from Price-Waterhouse Coo-
pers. The head of IT there said, ‘We want to work with
you.’ So we invested some money in training one of
their staff, and we went out in the market with a differ-
ent face because now we had the auditing company,
Price-Waterhouse, fronting this whole thing. We were
very happy to stay in the background, do the work, de-
liver the systems, and make the money in the back-
ground.
“And at the same time we started to be so successful
that in about two or three years, we downsized almost
100 legacy systems to server-based applications. We
were selling IBM computers from the Green Market
in Miami, Florida – buying them a few at a time and
bringing them back. We had gotten so successful that
IBM turned around and asked us to become one of
their dealers, locally. And that took place in 1990.
Many other companies started to work with Price-Wa-
terhouse, implementing the systems, and over time,
those clients started to trust us and started to use us
and that’s how we gained our recognition.
“A lot has happened since, and a lot of growth has
taken place in various directions. What has kept our
business alive and growing is the outlook we had to
recognize that PCs were going to become a commod-
ity of a kind. We realized that this was not a long-haul
process. We were so focused on expanding our tech-
nology base that in 1996, we decided that we would
not sell PCs anymore. We would only sell PCs if we
were delivering a complete end-to-end solution to a
company. We didn’t want to sell one PC or ten PCs,
somewhere, because we could not provide the level of
service given the number of technical people we would
have to keep on hand.”
But during the six years that TSL was selling IBM PCs,
the company was also learning about other emerging
technologies. For example, in 1994, TSL became inter-
ested in the business of credit card transactions, and
the machines, embossers, coders, and other equip-
ment that banks used to produce, secure, and person-
alize credit and debit cards. It continued to upgrade
and promote the Human Resource software that Galt
had developed, and also began providing credit card
terminals to banks.
The company did so well, that, in 1996, its provider,
VeriFone, an American-based, multinational corpora-
tion that provides technology for electronic payment
transactions and value-added services at the point-of-
