Business View Caribbean - August/September 2018

50 51 ANTIGUA COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY ware programs for hotels and other clients in the island nation and beyond. ACT created a program used by a finance company for the issuing of loans, a British West Indian payroll system, soft- ware for used-car inventory tracking, as well as many other products. However, Salomon, who de- scribes himself as a technical and “hands-on type” of person saw that along with these applications, there was an obvious need for the computers to run these programs. “It was at this time that we got into the importation of computers to supply these small hotels and other family businesses,” he says. “And, as it grew, we started getting more into hardware.” In 1990, ACT also began to provide network administration for its hotel clients who had no formal IT departments. “We became their IT staff,” he says. The company also expanded into the government sector as the need for automation was rapidly growing. As the company grew, ACT began to provide needs analyses for companies, as well as supplying them with the hardware that was required. “We came in during that period of time where everything was manual, so we were ACT Executive Team (From Left to Right: Aziz Doumith, Andrew Doumith, Salomon Doumith designing accounting systems with Point of Sale, along with the necessary training needed for such services,”Salomon explains. “We started in software development and as soon as we saw the need for more expertise in the hardware field,we got directly into it. It was a niche market–software development, hardware, and training.” The company also began assembling its own PCs (Personal Computers). “Having brand name computers was always an ex- pensive thing,” says Salomon. “So, we built our own brand–ACT computers.With that, we not only brought the technology to An- tigua, we made computers affordable and we trained persons how to assemble, repair, and how to program a PC. We had different types–educational, personal, as well as commercial.We grew the company at a fast pace into every single sector of the market; we captured over 70 percent of the computer market in Antigua during that time.” As clients’ needs for both software and hardware began to explode exponentially, ACT kept up with the frantic pace. “As the demand for these PCs were growing, so did the need for internet access,” Salomon re- members, “This was 1995-96, and we were configuring these PCs, getting them to the end users, and allowing them to have internet access.What we provided compli- mented one another and, in 1999, we were