Celestine Donough
Managing Director

Celestine Donough is a man who believes in the power of e-business. And he is on a mission to make sure that tourists from a remote fjord in Norway to the heart of Wall Street in New York can visit the Western Cape at the click of a mouse.

As managing director of IT company Software Colors, a leading service provider of application software products and services, he is in a position to ensure that this will become a reality.

Software Colors has an impressive track record with leading corporate companies in South Africa. This includes the successful roll out of SAP (systems, applications and products in data processing) for Safmarine in South Africa and Europe and making some of Sanlam's key systems accessible on the Internet.

Donough was instrumental in developing online gambling software for the pigeon racing industry together with his Europe-based partners. All this has taught him how to exploit the Internet to improve a company's bottom line.

Donough sees the core value that products such as the Tiscover online destination marketing system create in the access to markets and its ability to create genuine online sales. Software Colors is assisting to roll out the Tiscover system in the Western Cape.

E-marketing, he says, will make a positive contribution in growing the tourism industry. The key here lies in the Internet activity that the 2010 World Cup will bring, the launch of 3G cell phones with Internet accessibility and the change of telecoms industry in South Africa, which will reduce the cost of internet access.

Furthermore, .travel will bring an orderly marketing search and authentication process to the travel and tourism industry on the Internet which will change the world of tourism and online destination marketing.

It's these opportunities and challenges that inspire Donough. As he powers through a fascinating presentation on how it will all work, he explains that because he is a business analyst and a software developer, he straddles both worlds and as such, is able to deliver quantifiable results to his customers.

Donough started his career at Caltex as a corporate trainee under the Sullivan training programme of the late-1980s.

When Caltex started developing IT systems that supported its sales and marketing activities, Donough truly came into his own.

Donough was called 'into the middle; between the truckers and Caltex' where he was part of a team that developed a system that tracked orders, sales and standardised transactions from truckers and service stations all the way to accounts receivable and the bank.

It was a marked success and earned him the title of employee of the year.

Donough was then seconded to Caltex's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) evaluation team tasked with sourcing an integrated business system that would cater for all its needs. They then implemented the SAP system used by the oil giant.

Donough went on to reprise his role for other major multinational corporations such as Safmarine , but after the SAP systems were installed and fully functional, he got bored.

So, in 2000 he went looking for a new challenge, joined Software Colors and today he is the majority shareholder of the company.

'I wanted to be part of something that I was in charge of so I could stimulate my own creativity and create tangible benefits and quantifiable results for my clients,' he says.
Born in the early sixties in Elsies River, he is also a well-known pigeon fancier whose birds take part in races around the world.