Terawiz10¹²
Studio

Small team. Long memory.

Terawiz has been an independent consultancy since 2009 — long enough to have opinions, small enough to act on them.

The story

Terawiz started in Johannesburg in 2009, in the gap between two kinds of firm: the global consultancies that bill by the slide, and the dev shops that ship fast and disappear faster. We wanted to be the third thing — architects who stay for the build, and builders who answer the phone afterwards.

Seventeen years on, that’s still the model. We keep the team small enough that nothing gets lost between people, we host where our clients’ users are — including Teraco data centres here in South Africa — and we measure ourselves on one number: how rarely you need to call us in a panic.

“Tera” is 10¹² — a trillion. It’s the scale software reaches when it works, and the number of ways it fails when it’s built casually.

The name is a daily reminder to take the second half seriously.

2009 — FOUNDED 2014 — TERACO 2018 — DEVOPS 2023 — AI & DATA 2026 — REBUILT
What we believe
B—01

Architecture is a verb.

Architecture lives in the code, the pipelines and the decisions a team makes when nobody’s watching. That’s where we work, and it keeps our diagrams honest — they describe something that exists.

B—02

Context beats best practice.

A pattern that saved a Silicon Valley unicorn can sink a South African mid-market business. We design for your constraints: your team, your budget, your bandwidth costs, your regulators.

B—03

Dependency is a design flaw.

We’re structured to make ourselves optional: everything we build comes with the documentation and handover to run it without us. When clients stay — and most do — it’s by choice.

How we engage

  • Project

    A defined system, designed and delivered: scope, timeline, fixed team. Best when you know what needs to exist and want it built right the first time.

  • Embedded

    Our engineers working as part of your team — architecture, code review, mentoring, delivery. Best when you want the capability to stay long after we’ve left.

  • Retainer

    We run what we (or others) built: monitoring, maintenance, incident response, a number to call. Best when the system is the business.

Sound like your kind of firm?

We take on a handful of new clients a year — deliberately. The first conversation costs nothing.

Get in touch →