ANZ is a major international banking and financial services group and one of the largest companies in Australia and New Zealand.  ANZ’s history goes  back over 170 years when it first opened as the Bank of Australasia in Sydney in 1835. Since then the company has grown into one of the top 50 banks in the world.  The new state of the art 6-star green rated headquarters in Melbourne officially opened in Docklands in 2009 since the project began in 2006.

Designed by Melbourne-based architectural firm HASSELL, the massive “urban campus” occupies 130,000 square metres and is the office space for 6,500 employees. The design centers around a common vibrant hub that includes cafes, a visitor’s centre and public art gallery on the ground level. Throughout the building, 44 individual hub spaces connect to quiet working zones, with just over half the building being utilised as collaborative areas.  The entire area accommodates activities for work, play and relaxation. HASSELL won the 2010 World Architecture Festival’s Interiors and Fitout of the Year award for this architectural sensation. HASSELL’s inspiration came from the  adjacent Dockland’s riverside with the intention  ”of applying contemporary thinking in workplace design and leadership in sustainability to reflect the client’s focus on engagement and productivity while responding to its unique location.”

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Source: The Cool Hunter

Born out of an existing family business in 2008, GetSmarter has grown from strength to strength since its inception. The company is positioned as a high-touch online education company that works together with top universities and industry experts to deliver online short courses throughout South Africa. These short courses run for 10 weeks and include about 70 hours of comprehensive learning for their students. Having trained over 7,000 students in just a few short years, the future of online education is looking extremely bright. The company’s second year saw it grow by a massive 300%, and subsequent annual growth has been steady at 170% year on year.

It now boasts 50 employees and works with a network of 20 teachers throughout the country to teach people online. Rob Paddock, who has recently taken over from his brother Sam as Managing Director, explains, “We’ve moved offices three times in the past few years, and our latest move to 1,000-square-metre premises allows us to continue our expansion and find innovative ways of designing a vibrant company culture.” He’s adamant that the company won’t move again for at least another three years.

The space has also allowed the team to launch new projects through the newly formed GetWings incubator. “GetSmarter has allowed us to learn a lot about how people teach and learn online. Our new projects out of GetWings are all in the online education space and we’re looking forward to launching two exciting projects in the next few months,” says Sam Paddock, head of GetWings.

Both Rob and Sam believe that their businesses are built and supported by great people. It is in line with this philosophy that their new offices include a personal training studio run by a Biokineticist, who also looks after the team’s health and wellness, and a full-time chef who serves breakfast, lunch and afternoon snacks. The company has designed themed break-away rooms to stimulate focused team work. Did we mention the 150-square-metre balcony and 270-degree views of Cape Town?

Here’s the new office in pictures:

Priscilla, the Director of First Impressions, directs calls and visitors from her desk, which is where the subway-like map begins. Each colour directs visitors to a different department.

While the team rarely sees students, as all study is conducted online, there is a need to have comfortable waiting space for GetSmarter's visitors.

ChalkStar is another one of the company's new projects. Its team gets to look down this road in southern Namibia when they need a little inspiration.

Pictured here is the space for the company's new Kwiksta project. Also pictured is the 12-seater boardroom and a few guitars... just for fun.

Take a look at some of the other pics of this great office environment. My favourite – the blue sky room, with astroturf floors…

Afrihost was started in mid-August 2000 by Gian Visser, Brendan Armstrong and Peter Meintjes while Greg Payne joined the company in 2005 as a director.

In its first year Afrihost signed up around 300 customers and generated R450,000 in revenue. Since then the company has grown to over 50,000 clients and raking in over R100 million per annum. Wow.

Afrihost CEO Gian Visser says that the foundation of their success is the passion of their team. “It’s all about giving back – to both our clients and our staff. We are passionate about delighting our clients and the only way we can effectively do this is through our people”. You might know Gian from Twitter, where Afrihost regularly holds competitions, which are very popular.

Bandwidth blog’s series of office photos posts takes you inside the hottest internet startups locally and abroad. This week we visit Zoopy.com, an online and mobile social media community. Zoopy made headlines last year when they were acquired by cellular giant Vodacom. Since the acquisition Zoopy has gone from strength to strength – launching a redesign, announcing various media partnerships and producing high quality webisodes shows (some in HD) labeled as Zoopy TV.

Their offices are decorated in true startup style, funky walls, iMacs everywhere and chill areas for employees to relax in – we take you inside:

Props goes out to Zoopy’s CEO, Jason Elk, for sending us the photos.

Twitter is one of the internet’s hottest startups at the moment and with any internet business you need flashy creative offices to retrain and inspire top talent. Twitter’s new space, which was previously Bebo’s SF office, is right around the corner from their old one.

A few members of the Twitter team spent much of the weekend decorating the new digs with a number of Twitter-themed elements like birds and @ symbols. Check out some of the pictures being posted to the web by Twitter employees below.

via TC

We recently visited the Cape Town offices of local web hosting and data centre services company RSAWEB, located in the Cape Town CDB just a stone’s throw from Parliament and the Company Gardens.

Inside, the office consists of 2 floors, connected by a spacious skylit atrium at it’s center. The layout is mostly open plan with breakaway areas for meetings and solitude. The interior design is clean and stylish, but also shows a fun side with the three main boardrooms named Rock, Paper and Scissors. The official Xbox room also provides the ideal area for employees to relax and enjoy some quality gaming time.

RSAWEB is an Internet Service Provider, specializing hosting & connectivity. RSAWEB owns their own data centre infrastructure and provide a full range of enterprise class data centre solutions including dedicated servers, virtual servers, colocation and cloud hosting services.

Google has offices in South Africa headed up by Staford Masie, Stephen Newton (both resigned – no new country head announced yet?). Their goal is to expand the search giant’s advertising reach in emerging markets like in SA. Their office is a colourful combination of iconic Google items such as bean bags and lava lamps. Not quite the Google campus everyone dreams of working at in Silicon Valley but it’s a start.

Props to Graeme for sending through the photos. View our office photos archive here