After recently placing its Mail service with IS, Ananzi will be moving its main search servers from MTN Network Solutions to IS.

Ananzi will be hosted within the IS data centre at The Campus in Bryanston. In addition, the Johannesburg Ananzi office will be relocating to The Campus.

Ananzi, which is part of the Brabys Holding Group, was born out of an internal IS project in 1996, and today says that it has over 500 000 unique users per month, accessing over 10m pages.

It does feel like we are coming home, says Ananzi MD, Mark Buwalda. It is a bit like a teenager leaving home to spread their wings, growing up and realising the advantages of staying close to the parents, confident in their gained knowledge and independence, and not afraid to ask for support when needed. IS is almost like a spiritual home for us.

Ronnie Apteker, a founding father of IS, is delighted to see Ananzi back in the IS community.

Over the years we have put considerable effort and intellectual capital into adding value to Ananzi. Mark and his team have taken it to new heights, and now they have their sights firmly set on growing the business and adding value to their users. Having been so intimately involved since conception, I am delighted to see Ananzi come home, he says.

For Greg Payne, GM Hosting Division at IS, he sees the move as a positive value-add for his corporate customers.

Now that Ananzi is on our backbone, our corporate users will find searches to be quicker and more efficient. We are providing Ananzi with hosting in our data centre at The Campus, firewall, and load balancing. We have our normal SLAs in place and their users can expect world-class service, he says.

Buwalda is upbeat about the move: Moving onto the IS backbone brings us lots of value-added benefits, as we have our sights set on expansion into the corporate world, the final decider was hearing that M-Web was transferring all its dial-up users to the IS community. IS brings us this opportunity to show its customers what we can do. We can provide companies with quality traffic through our site, making a difference to their bottom line, and that ultimately is what it is all about.