It's not so much the buffet, good as it is, that makes the Radisson the best business lunch venue in Cape Town, but the location. You're on the edge of the water with a panoramic view of the bay and Robben Island, under large sun umbrellas and sheltered by the hotel building, enjoying a holiday vibe.

I choose the wrong day for lunch with Rob Sussman, however. As we sit down with plates laden with smoked salmon, mussels, sushi (not as good as Willoughby's) and a variety of delectable salads, there's a power cut in the city, and the hotel's generator kicks in with killing decibels.

Fortunately, I've already filled half a notebook with the achievements of the IT company launched six years ago by the 31-year-old opposite me. It's a liberating tale of suss and determination.

Sporting a nicely trimmed lion's mane and serious Kenneth Cole shoes, Sussman admits that he was never an academic. He just scraped through high school at Herzlia. He didn't even enjoy the computer class, yet in 2004 his company, Integr8 IT, won Microsoft's Gold Partner of the Year and Global Small Business Partner of the Year awards, so far the only company in Africa to receive this worldwide recognition.

"I have a letter from Bill Gates," he tells me, "thanking us for using best-of-breed technology, providing customised security solutions and helping to protect companies from hackers."

In October 2005, at the African ICT Awards (known in the industry as the Oscars of the ICT sector) he won the title that had gone to Old Mutual and Telkom in the two preceding years, that of Top Private Sector Chief Information Officer for Africa 2005.

Maths was the one school subject Sussman did well in. "When I was in my final year of electrical engineering, I got the highest maths mark they'd ever seen, 97%," he says, looking surprised himself. He then landed a position with one of the country's first black-owned IT companies, Bheki Sizwe.

"My first assignment was building computers for parliament. But no way could I see myself spending my life soldering components together in the back of the office." So he worked his way up to the computer networking solutions and integration department.

When the company was bought out by International Computer Ltd two years later, he found himself gearing up the Microsoft division of a huge corporation. After a few months he broke away and formed Cyber Warehouse.

"It was 1997, two years before the dot-com boom. Initially, I was a one-man show, the only capital my last salary cheque, but I managed to grow the business quite quickly to seven people."

His national break came when his sister's boyfriend, now his brother-in-law, Lance Fanaroff, told him about Metro Rail's need for a virtual private network (VPN) consultant. Back then, VPN was not an understood technology, but Sussman got himself clued up and flew to Johannesburg to meet them, sleeping on his sister's living room floor. They wanted him for other projects, so together with Fanaroff, he opened up in Johannesburg, and began doing outsourcing work.