About
Thirty years of getting the record right.
SAPnet started in 1996 with one job: make sure every South African book had a correct, complete record wherever it was sold or lent. The job has grown. The standard has not moved.
Who we are
A data company that learned to build software, and never stopped.
We began as the bridge between South African publishers and the international bibliographic databases: collecting title data, editing and classifying it, and delivering it daily to the retailers, libraries and aggregators that needed it. That work still runs every day.
Along the way we built the systems the work demanded — feed engines that validate ONIX against the standard and each recipient's dialect, a search index over tens of millions of titles, procurement platforms for university libraries, and learning platforms designed for South African connectivity. Today we offer the same engineering to anyone whose product depends on data being right.
We are a small, senior team in the Western Cape. We work in phases, review everything, and run what we build.
Timeline
From a title list to a platform estate.
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1996
Founded in the Western Cape
SAPnet starts supplying South African title data to the book trade.
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1998
International partnership
South African records begin flowing into the international bibliographic databases; the international feed becomes available locally.
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2008
Editorial services
Ongoing editing and classification work on a global bibliographic database.
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2015
SAPnet Solutions (Pty) Ltd
The metadata services continue under the current company.
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2020s
Platforms
ONIX 3.1 pipelines, Elasticsearch discovery for university libraries, offline-first learning platforms and AI-assisted enrichment.
Principles
Four rules we do not bend.
The corpus is the contract
What we deliver is what the data says. If the data is wrong, we fix the data, not the export.
Notes, never silence
Every transformation, guess and exception is written down where the next person can read it.
One bad record never fails a file
Pipelines isolate faults and keep delivering; the fault is raised, not hidden.
Alert, never ship
When a check fails, the run stops and a person is told. Nothing questionable reaches a client.
Where we are
Western Cape, South Africa.
Most of our work is remote, and our clients are across South Africa and beyond.
SAPnet Solutions (Pty) Ltd
Registration 2015/386330/07
Unit 4368Greenways
Strand, 7140
Western Cape, South Africa
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