Kester Hutson gives much of the credit for his induction into the world of Information Technology to his two-year stint at the Government Technical Institute (GTI), from 1998-2000, pursuing an Ordin-ary Diploma in Science and to the attention of George H E James, one of his lecturers there.
By extension, the two, he says, must take some of the credit for the rise of Dapper Technology, his nine-year-old IT company, which, he says, seeks “to provide customers with a complete and affordable solution to all their current and future voice/video/data communication needs.”
Familiar words, one might say, in what has been for more than a decade of one of the fastest growing sectors in Guyana.
Huston concedes that life as we know it, in all of its social, cultural and commercial dimensions has come to be driven in one way or another by the options that information technology offers.
Before IT, he says, his passion was science: Physics and Chemistry. He took to technology during the third of his four years as a lecturer at the GTI; that took him to Global Technology to pursue IT courses there. After four years of teaching at GTI he took a job at a local company called NETCOM.
The creation of Dapper Technology was perhaps inevitable. Hutson’s belated passion for IT was combined with an aptitude for business that was in his genes—several of his siblings run successful businesses. Besides, he had discovered that outside of teaching them, his pet subjects Physics and Chemistry offered no really worthwhile opportunities to make a living in the private sector.
Located at 140 ‘B’ Cummings Street, South Cummingsburg, Dapper Technology is one of those emerging small businesses that does much more than meets the eye. Aside from its owner and Managing Director, the company employs one full-time staff, Seon Singh, whom Hutson describes as a talented security systems person. Otherwise, the company makes its way through a succession of contractual arrangements under which it hires skills as and when the need arises.
Over time, Dapper Technology has continually expanded the range of its services. These days it offers equipment and services in such IT-related disciplines as Security Surveillance, PC Repairs and Maintenance, Home & Business Alarms, Remote Monitoring, Point of Sales Service, Network Support and CCTV systems.
Over the period the company has attracted an eye-catching array of clients including the local company Camex, UNDP, the Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) office in Guyana and Frandec. Good clients, Hutson says, can be retained only through scrupulous attention to the delivery of good customer service. “Growing demand for high quality support in Guyana means that the service company must be in constant communication with the client in order to ensure reliability,” Hutson says.
An impressive range of local clients apart, Dapper has established long-range business contacts with a number of mostly US companies in various facets of the IT industry. The local entity currently serves as the agent for the US IT support companies ZMODO, Royal Supplies and Eyez-On. Hutson says that Dapper is currently working towards serving as agent for yet another US company, Avaya, whose products are critical to one of Dapper’s important service contracts.
Dapper’s ultimate goal, Hutson says, is to create a service centre capable of providing the broadest possible range of technical support in the Information Technology field. That would mean more office space, a larger working area and more staff. He says that a strong and continued growth in the market for IT services is inevitable. “What we will also need is the creation of a higher profile for professionalism, reliability and efficiency in the field.
His experience, he says, is that good help is not always easy to find. He concedes that the talent is there but quickly adds that one of the challenges associated with recruiting persons is that there is, very often, little if any correlation with evidence of an academic qualification and field performance. “Inevitably, you have to do some amount of on-the-job training,” Hutson says.
The Dapper Technology head credits Chief Executive Officer of Brain Street Lance Hinds as doing much to take the sector forward. He believes that in his capacity as President of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Hinds can serve as a game-changer in the quest to further raise the profile of the information technology industry in Guyana.
Hutson says Dapper Technology, meanwhile, continues to gear itself to embrace the challenge of broadening the range of its services to an expanding Guyana market.0
