TechCentral Podcast: Recent Episodes
TechCentral
For most of business history, buying technology meant owning it. Capital was set aside, servers and laptops were hauled into the building alongside the software licences, and the business then sweated those assets for as long as it practically could.
In the age of AI, that logic is starting to break. Kit bought today can be obsolete in two or three years, chips are in short supply and the companies pulling ahead are no longer those that own the most but those that can adapt the fastest.
In this episode of TCS+, Shane van der Merwe, head of technology finance at Merchant West, explains why the shift from owning technology to simply accessing it is gathering pace.
Van der Merwe unpacks:
•What is driving businesses to let go of owning their technology stack;
•Why hardware — the physical "tin" — has been the last thing to move to a subscription model, long after software did;
•Whether this is a corporate trend only, or whether cash-conscious SMEs are moving too;
•How the rise of AI is accelerating the move away from owned kit;
•The global chip-supply squeeze, and the tiering that can leave South Africa further back in the queue;
•Whether being in the cloud is a competitive advantage in itself;
•What obsolescence really costs a business, even on equipment that is already "paid off";
•How the shift from capex to opex changes the balance sheet — and what happens to the IT team;
•What a Merchant West solution looks like end to end, including how Popia-compliant data destruction is handled when old kit is returned;
•The circular-economy angle, in which returned devices are given a second life rather than being scrapped; and
•How getting this right frees up cash and keeps a business competitive in its core operations, not just its IT.
Don't miss the discussion.
This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned. TechCentral
For small and medium enterprises, technology must do one thing above all else: get out of the way. Unlike large corporations with dedicated IT departments, SMEs run lean – and every hour spent wrestling with systems is an hour not spent on the business itself.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, brought to you by iStore Business, Sudesh Pillay, executive head of iStore Business South Africa, and Tamia Nontsikelelo, founder and CEO of womenswear label Tol’Thema, explore how SMEs can make smarter technology decisions and why the Apple ecosystem is increasingly the answer.
They discuss:
The pressures SMEs face and why low-maintenance, cost-effective technology is critical to their survival and growth;
How Tol’Thema uses iPhone and Mac in the day-to-day running of the business, and the practical value they deliver to customers;
Why historically fragmented SME IT is giving way to integrated ecosystems, and what is driving the shift;
The total cost of ownership case for Apple hardware, and why the premium price tag isn’t the whole story for budget-conscious businesses;
How Apple’s on-device AI, built into its silicon, helps SMEs future-proof their hardware investment;
The support iStore Business provides to ease hardware transitions and reduce the disruption of moving staff onto a new operating system;
Why native security and data protection features matter enormously to small businesses with no dedicated IT or compliance function; and
Which software and AI subscription costs SMEs can avoid by making better use of tools built into the Apple ecosystem.
Pillay also explains what happens when an SME’s needs outgrow out-of-the-box solutions, and how iStore Business provides the specialist support to scale with them.
Don’t miss this practical conversation about technology that works for South Africa’s small businesses. TechCentral
Communications regulator Icasa’s draft rapid deployment regulations – a critical intervention for the sector – risk failing unless the regulator brings municipalities into the process, according to Nomvuyiso Batyi, CEO of the Association of Comms & Technology (ACT).
Speaking on the TechCentral Show with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, Batyi said Icasa had consulted network operators and fibre companies but not the South African Local Government Association, which represents the municipalities that will have to apply the rules.
“You cannot just develop regulations without talking to all the parties,” she warned, arguing that Icasa should follow energy regulator Nersa’s approach to municipal engagement.
Asked when final rules might realistically be in place, she said 24 months – provided Icasa works through local government first.
On enforcement she was more optimistic. Section 21 of the Electronic Communications Act, amended in 2014, already empowers Icasa to set uniform procedures for permits and approvals at a reasonable fee, she said. “A lot of people may have missed the amendment.”
The gap is dispute resolution: the draft assumes disputes between licensees, leaving operators without recourse when a municipality refuses a way leave. At Icasa’s public hearings this month, ACT proposed binding municipal deadlines, deemed approval and damages claims for failing to respond to requests in time from telecoms providers.
ACT also objects to the detail in Icasa’s proposed national infrastructure database. Batyi supports mapping in principle but said the granularity sought would expose competitively sensitive information and create construction mafia and cybersecurity risks.
Beyond rapid deployment, Batyi listed four priorities on her plate: the newly finalised Rica framework agreement on Sim card verification, licence renewals by 2028, Icasa’s end-user and subscriber charter regulations and the Electronic Communications Amendment Bill – which she described as “embarrassing” in its current form.
ACT represents Vodacom, MTN, Telkom, Cell C, Rain and Liquid Intelligent Technologies. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media TechCentral
South African businesses are spending millions on cloud – and many have very little to show for it.
That is the uncomfortable starting point for this episode of TCS+, in which Nkosinathi Ndlovu speaks to Joel Chacko, executive head of department for cloud services at Vodacom Business, and Jonathan Oaker, founder and CEO of CloudZA, about why the promise of cloud still isn’t matching the reality for so many organisations – and what it takes to close the gap.
Chacko and Oaker discuss why cloud has moved from the server room to the boardroom, with business resilience, agility and AI readiness emerging as the new drivers. They also examine why pressure to “move to cloud” can run ahead of strategy, leaving costs to climb faster than returns.
The pair also cover:
•Common pitfalls behind cost overruns, including poor governance, skills gaps and the slow adoption of cloud-native thinking;
•Why hybrid and multi-cloud architectures have become the baseline, and the strategic drivers behind that shift;
•The mindset organisations need to thrive in the cloud;
•What to look for when choosing a cloud partner; and
•What businesses should stop doing immediately, and where to redirect that energy instead.
Don't miss the discussion. TechCentral
Optasia is on target to distribute more than US$6-billion in credit across its markets in 2026 – and it carries every cent of the default risk itself. In this episode of the TechCentral Show, CEO Salvador Anglada unpacks how the JSE’s biggest recent fintech listing actually works.
Formerly known as Channel VAS, Optasia was founded in 2012 as a single-country airtime credit provider. It listed on the JSE main board on 4 November 2025 at R19/share – top of the range, and oversubscribed several times. FirstRand took a 20.1% stake ahead of the IPO and has since raised it to 26.1%.
Today, Optasia’s AI-driven credit decisioning platform operates in 38 countries through mobile operators – MTN and Vodacom among them – and financial institutions, serving more than 120 million monthly active users and making 1.5 billion credit decisions a month. Microfinancing now generates 72% of revenue, overtaking the airtime advance business on which the company was built.
In the interview, with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, Anglada discusses:
•What happens in the 30 seconds it takes an unbanked customer in Accra to get a loan – and why partner banks, the “lenders on record”, carry none of the risk;
•The algorithms behind it: more than 5 000 data points per customer, models tailored to each market and a blended default rate of just 1.2% on unsecured loans with no collateral – and no blacklisting of defaulters;
•Optasia’s plans for South Africa, where Anglada sees 15-20 million people without proper access to credit – and why local banks will be the channel;
•The Nigerian regulatory dispute that suspended its airtime credit services – a suspension Anglada calls “a little bit aggressive”;
•Why Optasia chose the JSE over London, and how it works with FirstRand; and
•The road to 2030: new markets including Ethiopia, Egypt and Mozambique, plus SME lending, buy now, pay later and a “virtual credit card” now in testing.
Optasia reports interim results in September, with revenue guided up by more than 50%. Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
In the latest episode of Watts & Wheels with Wills, host William Kelly is joined in the studio by Greg Cress, automotive and e-mobility industry lead at Accenture South Africa, and Gary Scott of Scottify -- two of the longest-serving voices in South Africa's electric vehicle scene, and co-authors of a new guide to buying and owning an EV.
The guide was born of the basic questions that keep surfacing: what is a kilowatt-hour? Where will I charge, and will the plug fit? After a lifetime of mindless refuelling at petrol stations, charging is suddenly something owners must think about. The pair's advice is to demystify the maths.
The cost and battery fears, they argue, are largely misplaced. Public fast-charging still works out at about 60% of the running cost of petrol, home charging closer to 25% -- and less still on solar. Early Teslas are passing 560 000km with battery health of 85-88%, no manufacturer offers a battery warranty shorter than eight years, and chemistry is advancing fast, from cheaper lithium-iron-phosphate cells to sodium-ion batteries now arriving.
South Africa, the pair believe, is approaching its tipping point. The global oil shock has pushed EVs into the mainstream conversation -- and cleared dealer stock in the process. The official numbers understate the shift: industry association Naamsa counted just 1 088 battery-electric sales in 2025, but that excludes BYD and other Chinese brands that don't report locally -- and sales nearly doubled year on year in the first quarter of 2026.
Counting the unreported brands, about 500 EVs are now being sold every month, the guests estimate, and Cress predicts about 6 000 for the year. True inflection -- 5% of new vehicle sales -- needs 2 000 sales month, with the under-R400 000 segment, where the pair say two-thirds of South African vehicle buying happens, the battleground to watch.
Their advice for prospective buyers: know why you're in the market before falling for the shiny technology -- and above all, drive one. As Kelly puts it: if you haven't driven an EV, don't tell him they're rubbish.
Don't miss a great discussion! TechCentral
Aeversa’s John Ford unpacks the rands-and-cents case for electric trucks in this first of a new interview series.
TechCentral is proud to present the first episode of Watts & Wheels with Wills, our new interview show about electric vehicles and the fast-changing world of e-mobility in South Africa. In the debut episode, host William Kelly speaks to John Ford, sales manager at Aeversa, a fleet-focused electrification specialist helping some of South Africa's biggest logistics operators make the switch from diesel to electric.
Ford’s central message is that electrifying a fleet is not about swapping every diesel truck for a battery-powered one. Each depot has its own energy profile – municipal tariff structures, grid capacity, demand charges and time-of-use rates – and the trick is matching the right vehicles, routes and charging strategies to each site. Get it right, he says, and the savings flow: solar charging over midday, battery storage to bridge expensive evening peaks and cheap off-peak grid power overnight.
The numbers from Aeversa’s work with Takealot Fulfilment Services – the e-commerce giant’s logistics arm – back him up. What began in 2022 as a single imported electric truck covering 15 000km in a proof-of-concept trial grew to a 10-vehicle pilot that delivered an average 14% saving in total cost of ownership – before any solar or battery storage was added. With the fleet expanded to 21 vehicles and renewables in the mix, average savings climbed to 16%, peaking at 22% in some months.
Today the fleet numbers 35 vehicles consuming about 1.2GWh/year, with solar providing 60-82% of that energy. Aeversa expects savings of 18-20% on average – and, with global oil prices rattled by the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, potentially more than 30%.
“When you go electric, you can use those savings to expand your fleet or invest in solar and battery storage – and that adds more savings. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle,” said Ford.
Don't miss a great discussion! TechCentral
Episode 7 of Watts & Wheels – TechCentral's electric motoring show – opens with mock outrage: the South African Car of the Year results are in, and the Alfa Romeo Junior didn't take the overall title. Hosts William Kelly and Duncan McLeod demand a recount – though they concede the Junior's best design win takes some of the sting out of a competition in which Chinese brands claimed half the categories, with the Jetour T2 named overall winner.
In episode 7, William and Duncan get stuck into:
Ferrari's first EV – and the meme storm that greeted it. Is the departure from Maranello DNA brave or bewildering? And with Jony Ive involved in the design, are we looking at a glimpse of the Apple car that never was?
How to build a car, part 2 – continuing last episode's deep dive, William unpacks how "local content value" really works, why local plants no longer build the sub-R400 000 cars that make up 64% of South African sales – and why the tariff question is becoming impossible to ignore as India signs a trade deal with Europe and Morocco builds EV factories.
An interview with Mike Whitfield, CEO of Stellantis South Africa, on the group's plans for the local market – including a possible play in micromobility.
The death of the subscription model – why paying monthly for heated seats deserved to fail, and how all-inclusive Chinese cars helped kill it.
Robotaxis get real – Hyundai's Motional targets Las Vegas by end-2026, while Tesla's full self-driving goes live on European roads.
Solid-state batteries – Finland's Donut Lab claims 400Wh/kg and a website – donutbelieve.com – to prove the sceptics wrong.
Mad Chinese cars – a gargantuan luxury SUV with zero-gravity massage seats (foot massage included) and BYD's Fang Cheng Bao two-seater – the electric sports car the hosts reckon Ferrari should have built.
The episode closes with Hot or Not, where the Ferrari EV and Toyota's R1.18-million bZ4X – the company's first battery-electric model for South Africa – both feel the heat.
Watch S1E6 of Watts & Wheels now. Don’t forget to subscribe, and please share the show with your friends and colleagues. TechCentral
Pick n Pay has switched on an AI shopping companion called Penny inside its asap! app, and in this episode of the TechCentral Show, retail executive for omnichannel Enrico Ferigolli takes editor Duncan McLeod through what it does and why it matters.
Built on Google's Gemini models, Penny lets customers build a grocery basket by asking for what they want in their own words – by voice, text or photo – instead of searching and scrolling. Tap the "Ask" button, request a carbonara recipe, and Penny returns the method alongside a carousel of options for each ingredient to drop into the basket. It handles re-orders, meal planning to a budget and ingredient substitutions, and it reads photographs, too: Ferigolli describes snapping a handwritten shopping list and having Penny build the basket from it.
In the conversation, Ferigolli is candid about the limits. Penny does not place orders yet – it assembles the basket and hands the customer back to checkout – and its language support, while broad, is stronger by voice than by text and still maturing for South Africa's African languages. He explains why Pick n Pay tested several large language models before settling on Gemini, how the system draws on the app's own search, order history and Smart Shopper data rather than plugging Gemini straight into its databases, and where a retail-media layer fits in.
For more detail on the launch, see TechCentral’s full report on Penny and how it works.
Ferigolli discusses:
•How conversational shopping changes the asap! experience
•Why Gemini won on accuracy, speed and cost
•What Penny can and can't do at launch
•The multilingual and multimodal ambitions behind it
•How the 2025 asap! rebuild set this up, and what comes next
Pick n Pay is "a little bit behind" in online grocery, Ferigolli concedes in the podcast – but with Penny and the features to follow, he reckons it will "get ahead really, really fast".
Don't miss the discussion. TechCentral
Vehicle tracking has come a long way from its origins as a stolen vehicle recovery tool. Today, the data generated by connected fleets – covering driver behaviour, fuel consumption, route efficiency and real-time events – has elevated telematics from an operational afterthought to a boardroom conversation.
In this episode of TCS+, host Nkosinathi Ndlovu sits down with Silvia Schollenberger, chief commercial officer at Tracker, to unpack what that evolution means for South African businesses.
Schollenberger explains how the questions fleet managers and C-suite decision-makers are bringing to Tracker have changed significantly over the past three to five years.
Watch the video
Where procurement conversations once centred on cost-per-unit tracked, customers now want to understand how fleet intelligence can reduce total operating costs, improve driver safety and unlock strategic advantage.
Schollenberger walks through the typical technology journey a business takes – from basic asset protection to a fully integrated fleet intelligence stack – and identifies the triggers that tend to accelerate that shift.
The conversation gets into the practical realities of fragmentation: what businesses actually lose, commercially and operationally, when they run disconnected point solutions that don’t talk to each other. Schollenberger also shares an anonymised case study illustrating how fleet intelligence drove outcomes that went well beyond efficiency metrics, influencing strategic decision-making at the highest level.
On the vendor selection side, she flags the most common mistakes fleet managers make when evaluating telematics solutions and outlines what “end to end” genuinely looks like for a Tracker customer through solutions offered in partnership with Geotab International. Safety, she emphasises, remains foundational – and she highlights some of the newest features available to help protect both drivers and assets in the field.
The episode closes with a look at how Tracker and the broader South African telematics industry stack up against global peers – a useful benchmark for any business trying to gauge where local capability sits relative to international best practice.
Whether you manage a handful of vehicles or a large national fleet, this episode offers a clear-eyed view of where fleet technology is heading and how to make it work for your business. TechCentral
It’s been roughly 18 months since AI researcher Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” – using natural language alongside AI tools to write and deploy code – and the market for AI coding assistants has grown rapidly since. IBM’s entry into this space is Bob, an AI-powered development assistant built for enterprise environments.
In this episode of TCS+, Nathi Ndlovu speaks to David Spurway, IBM Power AI and security principal for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, about what sets Bob apart from the growing field of AI coding tools.
Bob’s roots trace back to IBM i, IBM’s integrated operating environment long used in enterprise and legacy deployments. That heritage is significant: while many AI coding tools target greenfield development, Bob is designed with organisations running legacy stacks – including IBM i and mainframes – firmly in mind. That said, Bob’s capabilities extend well beyond those environments, making it relevant to a broader range of enterprise development teams.
One of the more distinctive aspects of Bob is how IBM has positioned it – not as a traditional IDE but as a development partner. The “anthropomorphisation” is deliberate: Bob is designed to collaborate, not just autocomplete. That partnership quality shows up most clearly in onboarding. Rather than waiting months for a new developer to gain enough familiarity with a code base to contribute meaningfully, Bob can dramatically compress that ramp-up time by helping them navigate and understand existing code from day one.
Bob also performs real-time code reviews, a capability that Spurway suggests could prompt teams to rethink their development workflows altogether. IBM provides support to help organisations manage that transition, including guidance on integrating Bob into existing processes. Partners such as Edgetec play an important role in helping organisations manage this shift.
On the question of language support, Spurway addresses how teams can verify whether their specific tools and languages are compatible with Bob. Security is another focal point: the underlying models powering Bob are discussed in the context of enterprise risk, with Spurway explaining how Bob's code generation is designed to follow security best practices.
For those looking to explore the platform, Spurway outlines how individuals and organisations can access Bob, and closes with a summary of the key benefits for developers, teams and enterprises alike.
Don’t miss the interview. TechCentral
Episode 6 of Watts & Wheels – TechCentral’s electric motoring show – sees hosts William Kelly and Duncan McLeod wade into the most opaque corner of the South African car market: tariffs, subsidies and what they really cost the people buying the cars.
William opens with a deep dive into why locally sold vehicles are priced the way they are, unpacking the difference between SKD (semi-knocked-down) and CKD (completely-knocked-down) assembly, the all-important “local content value” that drives a car maker’s tariffs and incentives, and why economies of scale make it so hard for a country building thousands of cars a year to compete with rivals building millions.
The episode’s centrepiece is an interview with Donald MacKay, CEO of XA Global Trade Advisors, who demystifies how South Africa’s automotive support regime has worked since the late 1990s – and who actually pays for it.
The hosts then turn to the Chinese surge in local showrooms: Chinese brands already accounting for roughly 15% of the market once GWM, MG and others are counted in; and a run through the best-sellers, led by the Chery Tiggo 4.
Then it’s review time. William drives the all-electric Alfa Romeo Junior Veloce – 207kW, made in Poland, yours for R995 000 – and falls hopelessly in love (it’s rather sad to watch, if we’re honest).
Also in the mix: a jaw-dropping Volvo safety clip in which an EX60 is launched – airborne – into a steel pole; and a Rory Sutherland-inspired riff on why the self-driving car isn’t really a car at all but a “room on wheels” – a mobile office, a meeting room, even an income-generating asset – plus what an acceptable robot-driver accident rate should look like next to human drivers.
The show closes with Hot or Not. TechCentral
After a few months away, Watts & Wheels returns for the fifth episode of season 1, with William Kelly in studio and Duncan McLeod dialling in from the Southern Cape.
Watch episode 5 now
In episode 5, William and Duncan dive into:
•The new Suzuki Across, an entry-level SUV priced from R350 000 to R465 000 that squares up against Suzuki’s own Grand Vitara – and the welcome return of physical knobs and buttons, a trend Volkswagen is following, too.
•Dongfeng’s expanding EV range – the Nami 01, Nami 06 and E3 – a clutch of sub-R500 000 models turning up the heat in South Africa’s budget EV price war.
•Why fuel pain may be a tipping point: AutoTrader reports a jump in EV searches after the latest petrol and diesel hikes, with cheap used EVs vanishing fast.
•The spiralling cost of car ownership, from ad valorem “bracket creep” to research showing it takes nearly 15 000 minimum-wage hours to buy a VW Polo locally, against roughly 1 600 in the UK.
•A Polo milestone – 500 000 of the current generation exported – and finance minister Enoch Godongwana lifting the ministerial car price cap to R1.1-million.
•Whether Johannesburg’s City Power should be rolling out public EV chargers while it struggles to keep the lights on.
The “Crazy Chinese” segment serves up a Yangwang – BYD’s luxury arm – swimming across a lake, before the episode’s highlight: an in-studio interview with Gary Davies, the South African behind a purpose-built electric game-viewing vehicle. Dubbed the “Bentley of the bush”, it pairs a 63kWh battery and two 150kW motors with clip-on body panels and a biomimicry-inspired cooling fan, engineered locally with the University of Pretoria.
William then lives with Leapmotor’s C10 range-extended EV for a week and comes away pleasantly surprised – seriously comfortable, remarkably quiet and frugal, if let down by a fiddly key and an all-touchscreen cabin.
The show signs off with Hot or Not. TechCentral
Meet the CIO is brought to you by NTT DATA
Johnson Idesoh, group chief information and technology officer at Absa, says AI in all its forms – generative, agentic and the AI now being wielded by cybercriminals – is the single biggest topic on his desk, but cautions that it remains a tool that has to be tied directly to business strategy and customer outcomes to deliver value.
Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Idesoh said AI is maturing rapidly into heavily regulated industries such as financial services, and that banks must use the same technology to counter adversaries who are themselves deploying it.
Idesoh has held senior technology leadership roles across several large organisations, including group CIO at Old Mutual and leadership positions at insurer Aviva and pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca, before joining Absa as group CTO.
In the interview, Idesoh unpacks the thinking behind Absa's R2.4-billion software impairment in its 2025 financial year – a 13-fold increase on the prior year's write-off – explaining that it was driven not by a single large asset but by more than 100 smaller ones, and reflected three things:
•A fundamental shift in group strategy under new group CEO Kenny Fihla towards a Pan-African, client-led model;
•A changing regulatory regime; and
•The accelerating pace of technological change in AI, data and cybersecurity.
He also reflects on how banking technology has evolved – from the water-cooled mainframes of the 1990s to today’s far smaller IBM z16 machines and the move towards cloud and service-based consumption – and why the real challenge is not the mainframe itself but the decades-old Cobol software paradigms still running on it.
Listen to the interview
Idesoh also discusses:
•The noise around Anthropic’s “Mythos” model and what AI-driven vulnerability discovery means for bank cybersecurity, arguing that organisations should not panic but must become adept at using AI to find and remediate vulnerabilities at speed;
•Whether such models should be released to the public immediately or to large institutions first; the impact of AI on software development jobs, and his view that the traditional junior-to-senior developer pyramid may give way to apprenticeship-style models;
•How Absa is encouraging its technology talent to keep pace through leadership, early-adopter advocates and gamified celebration of new skills;
•The bank’s deployment of agentic AI, including its customer-facing AI agent and an internal IT-support agent that has handled queries from 11 000 colleagues with a 90% resolution rate; and
•His own path into technology, from an aspiring airline pilot who realised aircraft were becoming “flying computers” to a career that began on a BBC Micro.
Don’t miss any of the other great interviews on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO. TechCentral
South Africa has fewer than 400 public electric vehicle charging stations – up from zero just 15 years ago – and EV adoption remains stubbornly slow. Yet Charge, formerly known as Zero Carbon Charge, is betting big that a coast-to-coast network of off-grid, renewable-powered charging stations is exactly what’s needed to fire up the local market.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Joubert Roux, co-founder and director of Charge, joins TechCentral’s Nkosinathi Ndlovu to make the case for the company’s ambitious, R1.8-billion plan to roll out a charging station every 150km along South Africa’s national highways – and to explain why he believes the company is taking on “a timing risk, but not a business risk”.
Roux walks TechCentral through the December 2024 launch of Charge’s first site near Wolmaransstad and the unit economics underpinning the roll-out: just seven vehicles a day at each station are needed to reach Ebitda break-even. He also explains why every facility is designed to operate entirely off-grid, citing data showing that EVs charged on Eskom’s coal-heavy network emit 5.8 tonnes of carbon-dioxide a year, more than a comparable petrol car at 4.4 tonnes.
The conversation also tackles Charge’s unconventional fundraising strategy: a tokenised public offering on Mesh rather than a JSE listing, planned for June 2026. Roux argues that South Africa’s institutional capital is “extremely conservative” and that tokenisation will finally let ordinary investors into an infrastructure deal that has historically demanded R1-million minimums. The Development Bank of Southern Africa has already committed R100-million.
Roux and Ndlovu also discuss:
•How landowners hosting Charge stations receive 5% of charging revenue, and the rural economic development case that sits behind that model;
•The offtake agreement with transport aggregator Zimi covering 50% of capacity at upcoming N3 corridor sites;
•Charge’s formal objection to Sanral’s proposed policy giving it powers over businesses within 60m of national roads or 500m of interchanges, and the broader regulatory headwinds facing EV infrastructure;
•How BYD’s planned 1MW supercharger network and incumbent operators like GridCars – which already records 5 000 charge sessions a month – are reshaping the competitive landscape;
•Plans for 35MW truck-charging facilities and a long-term target of 120 stations across the national route network; and
•Roux’s prediction on when South Africa will hit its EV tipping point – and the two ingredients he says the market still needs: sub-R500 000 EVs and a genuinely reliable national charging network.
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
Companies large and small are pouring capital into AI projects, chasing the promise of efficiency, speed and scale. But as Jason Harrison, chief operating officer of The Up&Up Group, argues in this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, the upfront price tag tells only a fraction of the story – and many South African boards are signing cheques without fully understanding what they’re buying.
Harrison uses The Up&Up Group’s own experience in experimenting with and implementing AI to glean insight into the gap between the large promises by the technology (and its Silicon Valley pundits) and harsh realities of stalling projects in enterprises, especially at the integration layer.
The conversation digs into the costs that rarely make it into a chief financial officer’s spreadsheet:
•Policy and governance, Harrison argues, are not soft considerations – they are line items, often substantial ones.
•The costs of error: the reputational damage, financial exposure and legal risk when copyrighted material slips into outputs or autonomous agents go off-script.
•Agents that run amok, with companies then only discovering the problem once the cloud bill lands.
Beyond the balance sheet, Harrison flags AI’s energy footprint as a societal cost the industry is still reckoning with.
AI adoption is accelerating despite these risks and Harrison describes the current moment as a kind of nuclear arms race, driven by share-price pressure and a deep fear of being last. Much of today’s AI spend, he suggests, is Fomo (“fear of missing out”) dressed up as strategy. For tech leaders trying to make sober decisions inside a hype cycle, separating signal from noise has become a leadership skill in its own right, he says.
Suggested solutions include a “test and learn” philosophy where many small, inexpensive AI experiments are run throughout an organisation before viable instances are scaled appropriately.
Harrison cautions against one-size-fits-all deployments and argues that governance must sit close to the work rather than only in the boardroom. Quarter-to-quarter measurable objectives matter, he says, but only if they live inside a long-term strategy.
Despite his sober-minded view on AI’s high costs, Harrison still has an optimistic perspective on the technology and its potential to transform society, especially on the African continent. While the developed world is using AI to get answers, Harrison suggests African organisations may end up using it to learn how to think – a subtle but important distinction, and a timely note for any leader weighing their next AI investment.
Don't miss this discussion. TechCentral
What happens to your retirement savings when you leave an employer is one of the most consequential financial decisions most South Africans will make – and one of the most commonly mishandled.
In this podcast conversation with Mpho Chitapi, 10X Investments senior investment consultant Michael Rossouw sets out what should happen, what often does, and where the costs lie.
When an employee resigns, their pension or provident fund does not automatically follow them. Money is frequently left behind in an old employer fund by default, or withdrawn in cash during the transition.
The cash option is the most damaging. Rossouw cautions against it not because the money is needed less in the short term, but because removing capital interrupts compounding in a way that is extremely difficult to recover from later, even on higher future earnings.
A point Rossouw made bluntly is worth restating, because it is widely misunderstood: under the Pension Funds Act, individuals do not own pension or provident funds. Only a company can establish one, and employees are members of an employer-sponsored fund rather than owners of it. When the employment ends, the relationship with the fund changes, too.
What individuals can own are retirement annuities and preservation funds. A preservation fund is the vehicle into which an employee can transfer their accumulated retirement savings when they leave a job, taking direct control of how the money is invested and what they pay to have it managed.
That control matters. A preservation fund lets the holder choose an asset allocation aligned to their risk profile and time horizon, and integrates with a retirement annuity or a new employer fund as part of a single retirement plan. Leaving money behind in an old employer fund offers none of those advantages.
Rossouw’s sharpest warning is on fees. Even a well-structured retirement plan can be quietly undermined by costs that compound in the same way returns do – only in the wrong direction. He urged savers to interrogate the effective annual cost (EAC) of any product they sign on for. A 1.5 percentage point difference in annual fees sounds modest, but compounded over a working lifetime it can erode a meaningful share of an eventual retirement balance.
Higher fees are not always justified by better performance, Rossouw says, and savers should be especially cautious about committing to high-cost products on long contracts.
He is more measured on the role of online calculators and AI-powered tools, which have made it easier than ever for individuals to model their own retirement scenarios. The tools are useful, he says, but their inputs and assumptions need to be checked carefully – and outputs interrogated rather than accepted at face value.
The underlying message is straightforward. Retirement planning when changing jobs does not require expertise. It requires attention, an understanding of the available vehicles and a clear-eyed view of what fees will cost over time. The decision made at the point of resignation – leave it, transfer it or cash it out – is one of the most consequential a person makes for their own future self.
It is, ultimately, your money. TechCentral
AI Diagnostics, a Cape Town-based med-tech company that has built an AI-powered stethoscope designed to detect tuberculosis, recently raised R85-million in a pre-series-A funding round.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), Nkosinathi Ndlovu speaks to the company’s CEO, Braden van Breda, about the funding round and its mission to transform TB screening across Africa and Asia.
The round, led by the Steele Foundation for Hope, will fund the deployment of the Ostium – an AI-powered digital stethoscope that works in tandem with the company’s proprietary AI.TB model.
The device is designed to detect signals associated with tuberculosis in lung sounds in real time, putting point-of-care diagnostic capabilities into the hands of the nurses, pharmacists and community health workers who often serve as the first contact in resource-constrained health systems.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Van Breda explains why AI Diagnostics chose to tackle one of the world’s most underfunded diseases, and how an AI model can pick up TB signals that escape even trained clinicians. He also unpacks the painstaking work of building a TB-positive lung-sound dataset from scratch.
Van Breda also delves into:
•What the Ostium compares to a traditional stethoscope;
•How the company handles real-world recording conditions, from noisy clinics to paediatric patients and HIV co-infection;
•How AI Diagnostics stops the model from silently degrading as the device moves from a Khayelitsha clinic to rural Zambia or Vietnam;
•The company’s goal of securing World Health Organisation certification and the path towards that;
•How the Ostium is positioned against – or alongside – AI-assisted chest X-ray tools such as CAD4TB and Qure.ai's qXR; and
•What it would realistically take to put an Ostium in every primary healthcare clinic on the continent by 2030.
Don't miss the discussion! TechCentral
Vox, a well-established retail internet service provider is expanding its services to the wholesale market through aggregation.
In this episode of TechCentral’s podcast series TCS+, Andre Eksteen, senior product manager for fibre to the business at Vox, discusses the rationale behind this strategy and the services Vox is offering as “the ISP for ISPs”.
Eksteen delves into:
•The thinking behind Vox’s move into the wholesale space;
•The detail regarding Vox’s operating model as an aggregator with no physical infrastructure of its own;
•The financial benefits ISPs derive from engage via an aggregator against connecting to a wholesaler themselves;
•How aggregation services lower the operational burden on retail ISPs;
•Vox’s white-labelling service and how wholesalers benefit from it;
•The tooling Vox providers to help ISPs run their businesses more efficiently;
•How Vox balances the potential internal conflict of interest arising from it being a retail competitor to the same ISPs to which it supplies wholesale services; and
•The impact the existence of a wholesale aggregator like Vox will have on the retail ISP market.
Don’t miss it! TechCentral
The pace at which artificial intelligence is reshaping the threat landscape is outstripping the ability of most organisations to defend themselves, with shadow AI, synthetic identity attacks and a looming quantum computing disruption all converging at once.
That’s the view of DataGroupIT CEO Werner Lindemann, who joined Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show to unpack what business leaders should be doing about AI and information security.
Lindemann, who spent more than 30 years in senior roles at BCX and Clickatell before joining the security solutions distributor, says the African threat environment is no longer a watered-down version of what is happening elsewhere. Attackers are deploying the same AI-powered tools globally, and AI-enabled phishing campaigns now achieve click-through rates that traditional defences were never designed to withstand.
A bigger blind spot, he argues, is shadow AI – employees pasting sensitive data into unapproved AI tools without oversight. Lindemann says this is fast eclipsing the shadow IT problem of the past decade because the tools are free, frictionless and often invisible to security teams.
The conversation also tackles the credibility crisis facing identity verification. With AI now able to clone a CEO’s voice in real time or generate synthetic profiles that pass biometric checks, Lindemann believes traditional verification methods are fundamentally flawed. A big challenge is helping boards understand the issue in business rather than technical terms.
Lindemann also weighs in on the rise of the chief AI officer role, following Sanlam’s recent appointment, and on whether African organisations are equipped to adopt AI at the pace global peers are setting given the continent’s acute skills shortage.
The discussion closes on quantum computing. Lindemann challenges the conventional view that the quantum threat is a decade away, and outlines what business leaders should be doing now to prepare for the post-quantum cryptography world – even if the risk still feels distant. TechCentral
Award-winning South African film director Donovan Marsh has pivoted to artificial intelligence filmmaking and believes generative AI tools could fundamentally reshape how movies are made – and who gets to make them.
Marsh, whose 30-year career includes directing the Hollywood submarine thriller Hunter Killer starring Gerard Butler and Gary Oldman, the Spud films and iNumber Number, is the latest guest on the TechCentral Show.
The economics, he tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, are extraordinary: a single complex scene in a traditional production requires crews, equipment, locations and days of scheduling, while AI tools collapse much of that overhead into work that can be done at a desk.
But Marsh is clear that the creative work has not disappeared. He still directs shot by shot, much as he would on a conventional set, and uses a patchwork of different AI tools – no single product yet does everything. He has found that simpler prompts produce better results, saying over-prescription tends to degrade output quality.
Marsh acknowledges the disruption this implies for camera operators, lighting crews, set designers and extras. But he argues that AI filmmaking could prove liberating for smaller filmmaking markets like South Africa, where the budgets to make ambitious local movies have dwindled.
He has co-founded Dragon Studios AI with Ronnie Apteker and Stephen Cholerton, and is developing what he believes will be among the first AI-generated feature films. The tools are not quite there yet for a full 90-minute production, he says, but the gap is closing fast.
Marsh also weighs in on where the so-called “uncanny valley” still trips up generative video, the future of the acting profession and what AI filmmaking could look like by 2029. TechCentral
Everyone agrees that small and medium enterprises are the backbone of the South African economy. But the reality on the ground tells a different story – too many small businesses are still running on spreadsheets and WhatsApp, locked out of the tools that could help them compete.
In this episode of TCS+, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod is joined in-studio by two members of the recently established Vodacom Business advisory board: Sannesh Beharie, managing executive of SME and mobile products at Vodacom Business, and Andrew Fulton, co-founder of data analytics firm Eighty20, a Vodacom Business partner.
Vodacom Business set up its advisory board last year to bridge the gap between enterprise-grade technology and the small businesses that need it most, bringing together tech leaders and external specialists to help companies – as well as SMEs – navigate digital transformation.
In the conversation, McLeod, Beharie and Fulton dig into what’s actually stopping small businesses from going digital, whether bundled connectivity and cloud offerings are genuinely good for SMEs or just a polite way of locking them in, and where AI fits into the picture for a 20-person business in South Africa.
They also tackle how Vodacom Business positions itself against the likes of AWS, Google and Microsoft in the SME market, where a small business owner should spend their first R10 000 a month on tech, and the most common mistakes SMEs make when they do invest in technology.
Don't miss the discussion on what a genuinely SME-first solution looks like – and whether the tech industry is guilty of designing for corporates and simply shrinking solutions down for smaller businesses.
* TCS+ episodes are sponsored by the party concerned TechCentral
MTN South Africa has launched Pi, a digital-only mobile operator that runs on MTN’s network but operates as a standalone brand, offering contract-free mobile and home 5G connectivity through a single app, with no call centres, no credit checks and no lock-in.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod talks to Divyesh Joshi, chief commercial officer at MTN South Africa, about the thinking behind the launch and what it signals about the direction of the local telecommunications market.
Pi’s pricing is aggressive: R79/month for 500 voice minutes and R199/month for 20GB of mobile data, for example, alongside home fixed-wireless broadband plans.
McLeod asks whether Pi is essentially MTN’s fightback against Telkom, which has been quietly gaining prepaid market share with competitive data pricing – and whether the launch is also a response to mobile virtual network operators like Melon Mobile.
The conversation explores what Pi means for MTN’s margins, particularly on voice, and whether the aggressive pricing on calls is an admission that voice has become a commodity in a market where many consumers have shifted to WhatsApp for calls.
McLeod also asks whether Pi represents MTN’s attempt to get ahead of a structural shift in how people consume telecoms services – drawing a parallel with MultiChoice’s failure to adapt quickly enough to changing market demands in the video entertainment space.
A key question is what happens to MTN’s existing SuperFlex product, which targets a similar customer base. Is Pi going to cannibalise MTN’s own subscribers?
Finally, McLeod and Joshi discuss MTN’s new eSim-based roaming deals, which offer data at R12/GB in markets like China and France – though curiously, roaming in eSwatini, where MTN has a subsidiary, costs R85/GB.
Don’t miss the conversation! TechCentral
The South African Post Office has been in business rescue – a form of bankruptcy protection – since July 2023. Business rescue practitioners Anoosh Rooplal and Juanito Damons have made it clear to parliament that the entity will not survive liquidation unless a R3.8-billion bailout is received soon.
With some 5 500 jobs on the line, the big question is: is the Post Office worth saving? Rooplal spoke to TechCentral’s Nathi Ndlovu and was asked that question.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Rooplal talks about:
•The case for the bailout: The business rescue practitioners have already received R2.4-billion from government, while bailouts for the Post Office over the past decade amount to nearly R10-billion. Rooplal attempts to answer why this latest funding request is worth it.
•The current state of the Post Office: Rooplal outlines what the R2.4-billion tranche was used for and what the R3.8-billion request would do, if provided. He also details what the future state of the entity might look like and how, without much in terms of income, salaries are currently being paid.
•The need for a state-owned postal service: Even if national treasury were to agree to save the Post Office, does it have a place in a modern digital economy?
•External funding and asset sales: If the business case for the Post Office’s revival is so strong, why have the businesses rescue practitioners not sold or rationalised assets or gone to the open market for funding?
•Social grants and Post Bank: Rooplal explains what would happen to the many grant recipients processed via the Post Office should it not survive business rescue.
•Private sector partnerships: The department of communications & digital technologies in November issued a request for information seeking private sector partnership proposals. Rooplal explains the “chicken and egg” problem at the core those discussions.
•No more options: Chapter 6 of the Companies Act compels business rescue practitioners to file for liquidation if they see “no reasonable prospect” of rescue. Rooplal explains why he and his associate, Damons, are close to pulling the trigger.
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
Anton Fatti, chief technology officer of HealthBridge, says the doctor-patient relationship must remain at the centre of digital transformation in healthcare, even as AI reshapes how medical practices operate.
Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Fatti said AI and cloud computing are already easing the administrative burden on doctors and medical professionals, allowing them to spend more time with patients rather than on paperwork and back-office tasks.
Fatti joined Healthbridge as CTO in February 2025, bringing experience from senior technology leadership roles at the South African Revenue Service, where he served as chief technology and innovation officer, as well as at Discovery, where he was chief digital officer, and data business Lightstone, where he was CIO.
Healthbridge, founded in 1999, positions itself as a technology partner that helps medical professionals run their practices so they can focus on patient care. The company’s offerings have evolved significantly since its early days – from a pre-cloud, pre-AI era to a modern cloud-based software-as-a-service platform built in partnership with Google Cloud.
In the interview, Fatti discusses how the company has structured its innovation efforts. He also addresses which parts of clinical workflows are ready for AI automation today and which must remain human-led, and how far the industry is from AI playing a decisive role in diagnosis.
On the shortage of medical professionals in South Africa, particularly in certain specialities, Fatti explores how AI and other modern tools can make doctors more productive – and whether practitioners are receptive to adopting them.
He also shares his views on how policymakers should be thinking about AI in healthcare, the new skills emerging inside his teams and his approach to disrupting Healthbridge’s own business model before a competitor does. TechCentral
Most security teams can tell you what they've deployed. Far fewer can answer the board's next question: are we actually less exposed than we were three months ago?
In many organisations, the gap between security activity and real risk reduction remains stubbornly wide, even as threats become faster, more adaptive and harder to spot.
In this episode of TCS+, Clare Loveridge and Jason Oehley from Arctic Wolf unpack what the 2026 Arctic Wolf Threat Report reveals about how the risk landscape is shifting, both globally and in South Africa.
They discuss whether organisations are genuinely becoming more proactive, how AI is changing the game for attackers and defenders alike, and why familiar blockers continue to undermine even well-funded security programmes.
The conversation also explores what it means to "end cyber risk" in practical terms, why continuous improvement matters more than one-off projects, and how organisations should think about residual risk — the portion that remains even after controls are in place.
The episode closes with a look at Arctic Wolf's cybersecurity warranty in South Africa and what role warranties can play in risk management when prevention alone is not enough. TechCentral
Access to stable, reliable, high-speed internet is crucial to participating in the modern economy. Although fibre connectivity offers the highest speeds and reliability, fibre penetration rates unfortunately remain relatively low in South Africa, leaving may would-be customers wanting.
Vox recently launched Kiwi, a wireless connectivity solution promising a fibre-like experience with speeds of up to 200Mbit/s. In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, Theo van Zyl, head of wireless at Vox, provides more details about the Kiwi service and how it works.
Van Zyl delves into:
The rationale behind building a wireless service that offer a fibre-like experience;
Why customers should choose Kiwi over a 4G or 5G fixed-wireless solution;
The technical innovations Vox took advantage of to get the speed and reliability Kiwi offers its customers;
How Kiwi behaves in disruptive scenarios such as thunderstorms;
The various tiers customers can subscribe to and the speeds they offer;
The kind of spectrum Kiwi uses and how it does so efficiently;
The installation process and the hardware involved; and
Why the name Kiwi was chosen and its relevance to wireless technology.
Don’t miss in an interesting discussion! TechCentral
In this thought-provoking episode of TechCentral's TCS+, Mpho Chitapi sits down with Dr Josefin Rosén, principal trustworthy AI specialist in SAS's Data Ethics Practice and co-author of the influential report Constraint to Capability: Flipping the Narrative on AI in the Global South.
What unfolds is a rich conversation that challenges long-held assumptions about Africa's role in the global AI ecosystem — and reframes governance, ethics and constraint not as obstacles but as strategic advantages.
The discussion explores how deeply regulated environments sharpen one's appreciation for integrity, accountability and human impact — principles that are now indispensable in the design of trustworthy AI systems. This sets the tone for a broader conversation on why governance-by-design, representative data and bias mitigation are not "nice-to-haves" but foundational to sustainable AI adoption, particularly for public-facing systems operating in diverse and unequal societies.
A central theme is "flipping the narrative" — moving away from the idea that the Global South must simply catch up, and instead recognising its unique opportunity to shape AI differently. Rosén offers compelling insights into Africa's position as the youngest continent, cautioning that demographic advantage alone does not automatically translate into leadership. The discussion interrogates what must change — across policy, education, data strategy and governance — for Africa's youth dividend to become real AI leadership, and why the window to do so is open but narrow.
Listeners are taken deeper into Africa's distinct AI opportunity set: smaller, more context-specific language models; mobile-first innovation; and the potential to build systems that are locally relevant, linguistically inclusive and ethically grounded from inception. Rosén underscores that when AI systems — especially those interfacing directly with the public — are not sufficiently representative of the people and environments they serve, trust erodes quickly. Integrity, reliability and contextual relevance are therefore not abstract principles but practical necessities for AI systems that aim to endure and scale responsibly.
The episode closes by exploring practical use cases and forward-looking responsibilities, asking who must do what next — from policymakers and universities to business leaders and technologists — if Africa is to seize this moment. The conversation leaves listeners with a powerful message: the future of AI in the Global South will not be determined by scale alone but by the choices made now around governance, representation and trust.
Don't miss it! TechCentral
Artificial intelligence isn’t just changing how work gets done, it’s rewriting the rules of business. Organisations are scrambling to redefine processes and job descriptions, while employees are grappling with new tools and new ways of thinking that are transforming the way they approach their daily tasks.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Antony Makins, acting CEO at TForge and chair of the special group on AI and robotics at the Institute of IT Professionals South Africa, unpacks the skills revolution unfolding alongside the AI one.
Makins delves into the patterns emerging across organisations and the broader labour market as AI adoption accelerates.
He also explores the mindset shift it’s imposing on the workforce, and which roles are being hit hardest by AI-driven changes to how we work.
He delves into the opportunities that exist despite the very real threat AI poses to jobs – and what government can do to create an enabling environment for workers to adapt to a labour market increasingly shaped by AI, machine learning and data analysis.
Don't miss it the conversation! TechCentral
Safety is a core concern for e-hailing operators as it ensures that platforms engender trust among drivers, passengers and the general public. Bolt recently commissioned market research firm Ipsos to conduct research into the perceptions of rider safety in South Africa's e-hailing market.
In this episode of TechCentral's TCS+, Simo Kalajdzic, senior operations manager at Bolt South Africa, discusses findings from the report and how Bolt has used them to inform decision-making regarding its approach to safety on its platform.
Kalajdzic delves into:
The rationale behind Bolt's commission of the report;
Why market research firm Ipsos was chosen to conduct the research;
Key findings from the report and the products Bolt has developed using those insights;
The key drivers fuelling e-hailing adoption in South Africa and where safety ranks compared to other factors like reliability and cost;
Scenarios that lead to South African's choosing e-hailing over other transport types;
How e-hailing compares to other modes of transport in terms of safety perception;
What survey respondents said about e-hailing's impact on drunk driving in their respective cities;
Those features of e-hailing apps that make users feel safer compared to other types of transportation; and
* What users can do to maximise their safety levels when using the platform. TechCentral
Technology sits at the heart of modern capital markets, and nowhere is that more evident than at the JSE. In the latest episode of Meet the CIO, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod sits down with Tebalo Tsoaeli, the bourse’s CIO, to unpack how technology underpins Africa’s largest stock exchange – and how it is evolving for a more digital, global and real-time future.
Meet the CIO is brought to you by NTT DATA, where global experience meets local impact.
Tsoaeli has spent his entire career in financial services technology, starting out as an application developer at Rand Merchant Bank before holding senior technology roles at Standard Bank, Investec, Nedbank, FirstRand and Sanlam. He became CIO of the JSE three years ago, bringing deep experience in large-scale, mission-critical systems to one of the most tightly regulated technology environments in the country.
In the conversation, Tsoaeli reflects on his early exposure to computing and how a formal grounding in computer science shaped his career path. While he is clearly a technologist at heart, he explains how his role has evolved beyond pure IT delivery to focus on strategy, resilience, regulatory compliance and enabling market growth.
A major theme of the discussion is the JSE’s technology stack and how it has changed over time. Tsoaeli explains how the exchange now works closely with Amazon Web Services, moving away from a purely on-premises model to leverage cloud infrastructure for scalability, resilience and performance. He also addresses the question many market participants ask: can the cloud really be trusted with mission-critical exchange workloads, especially in a world where outages at global providers can have far-reaching consequences?
Latency and real-time trading are central concerns for any exchange, and Tsoaeli provides insight into how the JSE’s infrastructure supports the full trading lifecycle – from pre-market activity through live trading to post-trade clearing and settlement. He also touches on the exchange’s networking architecture and how it is designed to deliver predictable, low-latency performance for brokers and market participants.
The episode also explores the JSE’s strategic technology partnership with Nasdaq. Tsoaeli explains how this relationship operates at a technology level and what it has delivered so far, including support for market modernisation and international interoperability. Closely linked to this is the modernisation of the JSE’s Broker Dealer Accounting system, a project Tsoaeli describes as critical to improving efficiency, resilience and future-readiness.
Given the highly regulated nature of financial markets, security and compliance are never far from the conversation. Tsoaeli outlines how the JSE balances innovation with stringent regulatory requirements, and what this means for data protection, operational risk and trust in the market.
Looking ahead, the discussion touches on cross-border capital flows, dual listings and the potential role of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning in trading and market operations – along with the risks that come with them.
Finally, Tsoaeli shares his perspective on what success looks like for the JSE’s technology journey over the next three to five years, how he sees the role of the CIO evolving, and – in a lighter moment – his favourite productivity hack. TechCentral
The cloud revolution has challenged businesses of all sizes by changing how IT teams go about implementing projects and managing infrastructure. IT service firms have been doubly challenged, having to sell a new computing paradigm to their clients while also practising what they preach and adopting cloud-first technologies in-house.
Consnet is an IT solutions firm that leveraged the Amazon Web Services distribution model to accelerate its own journey into the cloud, enabling the company to do the same for its customers.
In this episode of TCS+, Dion Kalicharan, MD at Consnet, and Xhenia Rhode, AWS partner development manager at Cloud On Demand, speak about the benefits of leveraging the support structures in the AWS partner network.
Rhode and Kalicharan delve into:
•What the AWS distribution model is and how it benefits partners in the ecosystem;
•Consnet’s 21-year history, the services it provides and how its journey into the cloud began;
•How Consnet being supported by Cloud On Demand gave it the know-how to support its own customers on their cloud adoption journeys;
•The technical and training support that helped guide Consnet to upskill its teams and gain cloud expertise;
•How Cloud On Demand “marked Consnet’s homework” by double-checking the quality and efficiency of its cloud deployments; and
•How Cloud on Demand strategically meets its partners where their needs are.
Don’t miss this informative conversation! TechCentral
TechCentral’s electric car show Watts & Wheels is back for episode 3 of season 1, and while EVs remain the focus, the conversation takes a detour into something far less planet-friendly – and far more jaw-dropping.
Duncan McLeod and co-host William Kelly kick off by drooling over a wild new Toyota performance machine they say is real, street legal and due in 2027. It’s a 4l hybrid V8, rear-wheel drive “hypercar” with supercar proportions and serious numbers: 478kW and a quoted top speed of 320km/h or more. It’s the sort of car that feels entirely out of character for Toyota – and that’s exactly why they can’t stop talking about it.
From there, the conversation swings hard in the other direction: the all-electric Porsche Cayenne, which is shaping up as a huge statement from Stuttgart. The hosts discuss its performance claims – including a 0-100km/h sprint in the mid-2s range – and a range figure north of 600km.
They also debate the realities of EV depreciation and whether buyer anxiety around battery longevity is starting to fade as real-world data shows high-mileage EVs retaining strong battery health.
The episode then turns to Ford CEO Jim Farley’s candid admission that big, expensive EV trucks haven’t delivered as hoped – and why legacy car makers may need to refocus on smaller, more affordable models. The discussion touches on Ford’s partnership with Renault on EVs, and what that could mean for markets like South Africa.
But the meatiest local segment is BYD’s push into South Africa with an aggressive product and charging strategy. William and Duncan unpack their impressions of the BYD Sealion 5 plug-in hybrid – positioned as a direct rival to the Toyota Corolla Cross – and criticise the lack of technical detail shared at its launch. They also discuss BYD’s planned roll-out of a major charging network, including megawatt-scale sites, and what that could mean for shrinking range anxiety.
The episode closes with the show’s “Hot or Not” segment – and one clear takeaway: 2026 is shaping up as a pivotal year for electrification, even as petrolhead fantasies refuse to die.
Watch S1E3 of Watts & Wheels now – and don’t forget to subscribe. TechCentral
Chinese car makers continue their rapid push into the South African market, raising uncomfortable questions for incumbents. With aggressive pricing, fast product cycles and increasingly polished vehicles, the competitive landscape is shifting faster than many expected.
There is also an update on Stellantis’s manufacturing plans and what they could mean for South Africa’s position in global automotive supply chains.
The discussion turns to plug-in hybrids, which are emerging as a key battleground. The Omoda C9 PHEV and Haval H6 GT PHEV are discussed as examples of how Chinese brands are targeting buyers not yet ready to go fully electric.
Duncan and William chat about two new vehicles in South Africa: the Leapmotor C10 (and why William hates the term REEV) and the Alfa Romeo Junior Elettrica (which William is prepared to give a kidney to own).
And then there’s the Toyota GR GT. Duncan explains why this supercar has him seriously questioning his principles – and why some petrol cars are still capable of making rational people do irrational things. TechCentral
South Africa’s automotive industry is in a state of flux. In this episode of the TechCentral Show, BMW Group South Africa CEO Peter van Binsbergen unpacks the challenges – and opportunities – facing a sector under pressure.
He tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the future of BMW’s Rosslyn manufacturing plant in Pretoria, which was established more than half a century ago, and the urgent need for new government policy to ensure the automotive industrial base in South Africa is future-fit and ready for the shift to electric mobility.
Van Binsbergen also discusses the rise of imported vehicles in the sales mix in South Africa – including the rapid expansion of Chinese brands. China is a market he knows well, having spent three years there with BMW.
In the interview, TechCentral Show viewers will also hear about:
•The state of the local automotive manufacturing industry;
•What South Africa needs to implement in policy reform to ensure the automotive industrial base in South Africa – and why this is urgent;
•How the country must adapt to the global shift to electric mobility;
•The role of BMW’s IT Hub in South Africa;
•BMW’s global EV strategy, and what that means for South African EV buyers; and
•BMW’s Neue Klasse vehicles, which run the company’s next-generation EV platform, and why they are significant to its future.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion! TechCentral
Cybersecurity is undergoing a quiet but important shift in South African boardrooms: from a defensive cost centre to a strategic business enabler. That was the central theme of a recent TechCentral TCS+ podcast discussion featuring Vodacom Business acting executive head for cloud security Lukhanyo Zahela and KnowBe4 Africa senior vice-president for content strategy Anna Collard.
Once seen primarily as an IT problem, cybersecurity is now recognised as a material business risk with direct financial, operational and reputational consequences. But the discussion made clear that security, done well, can also signal organisational maturity to regulators, investors and partners – and increasingly, become a source of competitive advantage.
Collard likened strong security controls to having “good brakes on a fast car”. Without them, businesses cannot safely deploy emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence or scale digital platforms with confidence. Availability and resilience, she argued, are foundational: “Businesses are in business to stay in business.”
That foundation is under growing pressure. Zahela said South Africa’s threat landscape is evolving rapidly, driven by a criminal ecosystem that is itself adopting automation and AI. Phishing attacks have become far more convincing, while ransomware continues to disrupt cloud migrations, often exploiting misconfigured environments rushed into production.
Defenders, however, are also using AI. Vodacom Business has integrated AI-driven detection and response into its managed security services, reducing the time taken to detect and respond to threats from hours to minutes, or even seconds. Crucially, these systems are adaptive, learning continuously from global threat intelligence rather than relying on static rules.
Despite advances in automation, human behaviour remains central to security outcomes. Many breaches still involve simple mistakes. Collard argued that well-trained employees can act as an extension of the security function, providing judgment and context that AI cannot. The challenge is that organisations must now secure not only people, but also the AI tools and agents they use – all of which can themselves be manipulated.
This requires what Collard described as “digital mindfulness”: a security-aware culture led from the top. Executives must model good behaviour, while organisations adopt zero-trust principles that continuously verify identity and access rights across employees, partners and devices, enforcing least-privilege access by default.
To turn security into an enabler rather than a blocker, it must be embedded from the start. “Security by design” – integrating safeguards into systems, processes and digital initiatives upfront – avoids costly retrofits later and allows innovation to move faster with clearer risk boundaries.
The payoff can be tangible. A strong security posture can reduce cyber-insurance costs, improve business continuity and prevent expensive operational disruptions. More broadly, trust built through resilience and good governance can attract customers, partners and investors.
The key message for business leaders, the speakers agreed, is to stop treating security as reactive. The more powerful question is no longer, “How do we protect what we have?”, but rather, “How does security enable us to do what we couldn’t do before?”
Don’t miss this important conversation! TechCentral
TechCentral’s motoring show, Watts & Wheels, is officially back, with the first full episode of season 1 widening the lens beyond new cars to look at the forces reshaping South Africa’s automotive industry.
The first episode of season 1 – you can catch our “season 0” episodes here – opens with a sharp focus on South African Auto Week, where the pressure on local vehicle manufacturers dominated discussions.
Original equipment manufacturers are facing a tough balancing act as imports rise while local assembly plants wrestle with costs, scale and uncertainty.
From policy to products, the show then shifts gears to tyre maker Bridgestone, which has launched new tyre offerings for the South African market. In an interview, Jacques Rikhotso, CEO of Bridgestone South Africa, unpacks how changing vehicle technologies – including heavier EVs – are influencing tyre design, durability and safety.
Chinese brands also feature prominently. A dramatic crash test involving the Chery Tiggo 9 Pro highlights the rapid strides Chinese manufacturers are making in safety engineering. Meanwhile, BYD continues to push the boundaries of EV infrastructure, announcing plans for a 1MW ultra-fast charging network, championed by BYD executive Stella Li.
Adventure meets electrification with a discussion on Volvo EX30 Cross Country, which recently tackled the iconic Sani Pass – a symbolic moment for EV capability in rugged African conditions.
On the new-car front, the team runs through arrivals and upcoming launches including the BYD Dolphin Surf and the forthcoming Volvo EX60.
The review spotlight falls on the Lexus GX550, described as the “anti-EV”: a traditional, petrol-powered luxury off-roader that doubles down on ruggedness rather than electrification.
Rounding out the episode is an interview with Andrew Kirby, CEO of Toyota South Africa, and we speculate on the electric vehicle models Toyota is likely to introduce into the local market in 2026. TechCentral
Africa’s digital transformation continues to accelerate, driven by growing cloud adoption and rising interest in artificial intelligence.
Yet many organisations still face challenges in converting these ambitions into measurable business outcomes. According to Cliff de Wit, group chief innovation officer at Accelera Digital Group, the success of AI-driven initiatives depends as much on culture and governance as it does on technology.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+ podcast, De Wit outlines the practical steps leaders can take to reduce organisational friction, strengthen data foundations and enable cloud-led innovation at scale.
“Cloud is no longer an IT decision. It is the foundation on which every modern AI strategy is built,” says De Wit. And technical readiness alone is not enough. “The biggest barrier is not the tech, it’s whether the organisation is prepared to manage change at the pace AI requires.”
In this episode, De Wit discusses:
•The concept of organisational drag and how it affects AI progress;
●Approaches to strengthening culture and governance within digital programmes;
●The role of the C-suite in accelerating cloud and AI adoption while demonstrating clear return on investment;
●What an AI-ready data foundation looks like and why it is essential;
●How strong data management practices unlock new sources of business value; and
●Why African organisations are increasingly well positioned to advance rapidly through cloud-first strategies.
The discussion provides practical guidance for business and technology leaders seeking a clearer understanding of how cloud, data and culture intersect to enable enterprise-wide AI transformation. Don’t miss it! TechCentral
Newly minted small businesses often struggle to establish themselves as reliable service providers among their more established competitors. To help cloud-focused business thrive, Amazon Web Services has created the AWS distribution model to support small businesses and help them grow.
In this episode of TCS+, Cloud on Demand’s Xenia Rhode and Developmenthub’s Odwa Ndyaluvane explain how the AWS distribution model benefits partners in the same ecosystem.
In this episode, Rhode and Ndyavulane discuss:
•An overview of the AWS distribution model and its ecosystem partners;
•Who Developmenthub is and how the company started;
•The support Cloud on Demand, an AWS select partner, provides to Developmenthub;
•The business outcomes that Developmenthub has achieved through the partnership;
•The business development support available within the partner ecosystem;
•The new market access opportunities Cloud on Demand was able to avail to Developmenthub; and
•New revenue streams that Developmenthub was able to tap into because of the Cloud on Demand partnership.
Don’t miss the discussion. TechCentral
South Africa’s big three telecommunications operators have all reported numbers in recent weeks, and the theme is clear: competition in prepaid has intensified sharply.
Telkom’s resurgence has put pressure on both MTN and Vodacom, with MTN acknowledging it has “discernibly” lost prepaid market share.
This is one of the topics covered in this wide-ranging and exclusive TechCentral Show interview with MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita, who sat down earlier this week with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod to discuss this and other major topics, including:
•The impact of online gambling on the telecoms sector;
•The need for further consolidation in South African telecoms, and why Mupita won’t completely rule out a deal with Telkom, provided the “stars align”;
•Vodacom’s acquisition of a co-controlling stake in Vumatel parent Maziv and how MTN will respond;
•The impact of low-Earth orbit satellite connectivity on the telecoms industry and how MTN plans to work with companies like SpaceX/Starlink and Amazon Leo – and whether he sees them as competitors or partners (or both);
•The spectacular turnaround in Nigeria and whether it’s durable;
•The future of MTN’s involvement in Iran, and the lessons learnt from the group’s exit from other Middle Eastern markets;
•Plans to shift MTN Group’s focus to East Africa in the coming years; and
•Why he’s fascinated by the impact that AI could have on telecoms in Africa.
Don’t miss a great discussion on the future of MTN and telecoms in Africa! TechCentral
Returning to the TechCentral Show is ICT regulatory expert Dominic Cull, founder of Ellipsis and regulatory advisor to the Internet Service Providers’ Association. Cull recently attended communications minister Solly Malatsi’s policy colloquium in Pretoria – the first under a non-ANC communications minister.
Cull says there is a discernibly different tone from Malatsi compared to his predecessors: more openness, more willingness to engage stakeholders and a stronger focus on evidence-based policymaking. However, while the intent is encouraging, South Africa’s ICT policy environment remains inconsistent, slow and fragmented.
In the podcast, Cull discusses:
•Malatsi’s policy colloquium and what came out of it
•The state of ICT policy and regulation in South Africa
•The biggest policy bottlenecks holding back growth in the ICT sector
•Why government doesn’t fully grasp the economic impact of digital infrastructure
•The latest on the next spectrum auction
•The EU’s decision to hand much of the 6GHz band to mobile operators – and why South Africa shouldn’t blindly copy it
•What’s needed to fix the Rica legislation
•Why Starlink isn’t coming to South Africa anytime soon
Cull also shares the top priority areas he’d focus on in 2026 if he was minister of communications.
It’s a great discussion – don’t miss it! TechCentral
Welcome to season 2 of Meet the CIO, TechCentral’s podcast series that dives into the minds of South Africa’s top technology leaders. Meet the CIO is brought to you by NTT DATA – where global experience meets local impact.
After a highly successful first season featuring CIOs from across the corporate landscape, we’re kicking off season 2 with a conversation with Khaya Mbanga, chief information and digital officer at BDO South Africa, where he also heads the firm’s growing BDO Digital division.
BDO is one of the world’s largest professional services firms, specialising in audit, tax and advisory. Headquartered in Belgium, its name comes from the three founding firms – Binder, Dijker and Otte – that merged to form the organisation.
In this wide-ranging episode, Mbanga reflects on his career journey through consulting, FMCG and mining; how he first got into technology; and the evolution of the CIO role into one that now straddles digital strategy, cybersecurity, AI and organisational change.
He also unpacks his passion for artificial intelligence, including his involvement in the IITPSA Special Interest Group on AI and Robotics, and offers his perspective on how AI will reshape auditing, tax and broader business functions in South Africa. From managing hallucinations in large language models to rethinking talent pipelines, Mbanga shares candid insights into both the opportunities and risks ahead.
Topics covered include:
•What it means to be the CIDO of BDO South Africa
•Career background across consulting, FMCG and mining
•His first computer and how he got into technology
•Robotic process automation in the mining sector
•How AI will transform auditing and tax
•Dealing with the risk of AI hallucinations in data-sensitive environments
•The broader impact of AI on South African business
•Technology talent shortages and what skills CIOs need today
•His favourite productivity hacks and tools
Don’t miss this great opener to the new season of Meet the CIO. If you missed any of the interviews from season 1, you can find them all on TechCentral. TechCentral
South Africa’s automotive industry is in a state of flux. In this episode of the TechCentral Show, BMW Group South Africa CEO Peter van Binsbergen unpacks the challenges – and opportunities – facing a sector under pressure.
He tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the future of BMW’s Rosslyn manufacturing plant in Pretoria, which was established more than half a century ago, and the urgent need for new government policy to ensure the automotive industrial base in South Africa is future-fit and ready for the shift to electric mobility.
Van Binsbergen also discusses the rise of imported vehicles in the sales mix in South Africa – including the rapid expansion of Chinese brands. China is a market he knows well, having spent three years there with BMW.
In the interview, TechCentral Show viewers will also hear about:
•The state of the local automotive manufacturing industry;
•What South Africa needs to implement in policy reform to ensure the automotive industrial base in South Africa – and why this is urgent;
•How the country must adapt to the global shift to electric mobility;
•The role of BMW’s IT Hub in South Africa;
•BMW’s global EV strategy, and what that means for South African EV buyers; and
•BMW’s Neue Klasse vehicles, which run the company’s next-generation EV platform, and why they are significant to its future.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion! TechCentral
Altron earlier this month announced that it has deployed an "AI factory" in one of Teraco’s new Johannesburg data centres. Powered by Nvidia AI infrastructure and software, the factory is has already gone live with half a dozen customers.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Altron Group chief technology officer Bongani Andy Mabaso explains the rationale for the investment, what building the factory entailed and what the anchor tenants are using the platform to do.
Mabaso tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod:
•What an AI factory is exactly and why Altron has decided to build one;
•What’s involved in deploying AI infrastructure, especially from a power and cooling perspective – and why Altron decided to locate its AI factory at Teraco;
•What companies like Lelapa AI, MathU and Dataviue are using the Altron AI Factory to do;
•Why Altron partnered with Asus and HPE on the project;
•How the infrastructure can be used; and
•The advantages of hosting an AI factory in South Africa, as opposed to an offshore data centre – it’s not only about better network latency.
Don’t miss the conversation! TechCentral
Vodacom Business recently appointed an “extraordinary business advisory board”, a strategic initiative designed to strengthen its enterprise expertise and support organisations on their digital transformation journeys.
To unpack the decision to appoint an advisory board, TechCentral is joined in this episode of TCS+ by Videsha Proothveerajh, director of Vodacom Business, who explains that it’s all part of Vodacom’s shift from being a traditional telecommunications provider to a “techco”, or technology company.
In this episodes Proothveerajh chats about:
•The advisory board, who it is comprised of and the purpose it is meant to serve in the business services landscape in South Africa;
•The fact that the pace of technology change has accelerated coming out of Covid and how this influenced Vodacom Business’s approach to digital transformation;
•How the new advisory board influences Vodacom’s approach to guiding enterprise clients on digital transformation;
•The role the latest telecoms technologies, including 5G and the internet of things, are playing in the business-to-business environment in which Vodacom Business operates;
•How Vodacom Business tailors its digital transformation solutions to meet the needs of different industries or enterprise segments, or indeed of customers that might not be as advanced as others in their application of technology;
•The most common obstacles South African enterprises face when it comes to technology adoption and digital transformation; and
•The emerging trends and technologies that will have the biggest impact on the business market in the next few years.
Don’t miss an informative discussion! TechCentral
The invention of the silicon transistor was fundamental to the success of the digital age, driving the core of the modern-day digital economy.
The rise of generative AI has put hardware at the epicentre of the next wave of economic growth, with chip makers such as Nvidia and AMD reaching record valuations as demand for advanced chips far outstrips supply.
But as AI data centres expand, so, too, does their consumption of resources, with their demand for water and electricity rising exponentially.
FinalSpark is a Swiss biocomputing company exploring more efficient ways of computing – and it’s turned to human neurons as a potential solution.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Fred Jordan, co-founder and co-CEO of FinalSpark, gives insight into “wetware” (in effect, living hardware) and what it means for the future of computing.
Jordan delves into:
•What inspired him turn to living neurons as a means of processing;
•Parallels between his training as a signal processing engineer and his work with living neurons;
•Why FinalSpark uses human neurons and not any other like those from a cat on an octopus;
•How skin cells are used to “create” the neurons;
•How the neurons are fed, stored and kept alive;
•How long the neurons live for and the sort of computations FinalSpark has made them perform; and
•His views on the future of computing.
Don’t miss this intriguing discussion! TechCentral
In today’s hyperconnected society, mobile connectivity is key to running a successful business, helping keep employees connected to each other, to organisational resources and to customers.
To manage communications effectively, businesses need to have a clear view of the entire Sim estate across the organisation. Monitoring usage and having the control needed to provide (or restrict) resources such as voice minutes and data quickly and easily are critical to managing costs effectively.
MSB Micro Systems is a company specialising in managed network connectivity for corporate entities. In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, MSB Microsystems founder and CEO Danny Stemmet talks about the ins and outs of Sim management.
Stemmet delves into:
•MSB Micro’s history and how the company changed from being a software development house to a services company;
•How the rise of hybrid work environments and remote teams have affected demand for Sim management services, especially among mobile workforces;
•How MSB Micro Systems supports Sims that perform machine-to-machine communications and other internet-of-things functions;
•How MSB’s network-agnostic approach provides flexibility its resellers and, by extension, their clients;
•How MSB’s pricing model supports businesses at every stage growth, helping them scale appropriately when they need to;
•The key benefits for a company that chooses to use a managed connectivity service rather than managing their mobile estate directly with an operator; and
•Why MSB Micro is changing its business model from being a managed service provider to a platform business.
Don’t miss this informative conversation. TechCentral
Cryptocurrencies are increasingly moving beyond being seen as an investment asset as users find more real-world uses in everyday contexts. It appears that crypto is becoming more like cash – with users prepared to use it as the point of sale.
Crypto payments specialist MoneyBadger recently signed a deal with fintech Scan to Pay allowing crypto wallet users pay at more than 650 000 stores nationwide.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, MoneyBadger CEO Carel van Wyk and Luno country manager for South Africa Christo de Wit tell TechCentral’s Nathi Ndlovu about what the partnership means for crypto platforms, their users and the broader economy.
Van Wyk and De Wit delve into:
•The mindset shift that happens when users move from being crypto investors to day-to-day users of digital currencies;
•How crypto payments allow for immediate settlement in rands and what that means for merchants and users;
•How merchants benefit by supporting crypto payments at their stores;
•Why a crypto investor might want to consider using it to make payments;
•The tax implications that must be considered before investing in or using crypto for payments;
•The role cryptocurrencies play in promoting financial inclusion; and
•The role cryptocurrencies will play as the Reserve Bank modernises the National Payment System.
Don’t miss an interesting discussion! TechCentral
When most people think of Amazon Web Services, they automatically assume they should go directly to AWS. However, for the diverse ecosystem of AWS partners – including managed service providers and independent software vendors – the real secret to achieving significant growth often lies in leveraging the distributor model.
Consider this analogy: if AWS is a powerful cloud engine, then the reseller acts as the skilled driver. But who manages the complexities of operating the vehicle, such as maintenance, refuelling, training and necessary pit stops? That administrative heavy lifting falls to the distributor.
In this episode of TCS+, Senzo Mbhele, MD at Cloud On Demand, explains the AWS distribution model and its advantages.
Mbhele discusses:
•The main business challenges that the AWS distribution model addresses;
•How distributors create financial value and improve return on investment for others in the ecosystem, including end customers;
•The support distribution partners provide to internal teams, enabling them to achieve more without the need to hire additional staff;
•The expertise distributors offer to help chief information officers and chief technology officers manage risk, security and governance throughout their cloud journey;
•Common misconceptions that may cause executives to hesitate before partnering with a distributor; and
•Indicators that suggest it might be time for a business to consider the services of a distribution partner, along with the benefits this can bring.
Don’t miss this engaging conversation! TechCentral
E-commerce will soon reach an important milestone in South Africa: by January, according to World Wide Worx research, online shopping will top 10% of total retail sales for the first time. The move to 15% and then to 20% will come much quicker.
That’s the view of Frederik Zietsman, CEO of Naspers-owned Takealot Group – South Africa’s largest online retailer – who was speaking to TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show.
In the interview, Zietsman unpacks what’s driving the rapid adoption of online shopping in South Africa – Covid-19 was a key trigger – and what the future holds as international e-commerce giants step up their investments in the country.
He also discusses:
•How the competitive dynamics of the market have changed in recent years;
•The impact of the entry of international giants such as Amazon and Walmart and how this will reshape the market in the coming years;
•The decision to expand subsidiary Mr D’s focus from fast food to include new product categories;
•The township opportunity and how Takealot is working to crack that market;
•Takealot’s plans to move to electric vehicles in its logistics fleet, including a look at what’s needed to introduce electric motorbikes at scale;
•The challenge of crime in the logistics chain and what’s being done to fight it;
•Why Takealot is getting into the home loans business; and
•What’s going to drive the company’s growth in the next few years.
Don’t miss a fascinating conversation! TechCentral
Seacom last week announced that it plans to build one of the highest-capacity subsea broadband cable systems the world has ever seen.
Dubbed Seacom 2.0, the cable system – which will have an expected design capacity of a staggering 2 000Tbit/s – will be larger than the company’s original system, which brought high-speed connectivity to Africa’s eastern coastline when it was launched in 2009.
The new system, which will include an “express route” from South Africa to Singapore and leg around South Africa to Lobito in Angola – and which will also cover much of the same East African coastline as the first system – will use the latest fibre-optic technology and 48 fibre pairs to deliver its extreme total capacity.
Alpheus Mangale, CEO of Seacom, sat down with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod for an exclusive first interview with the TechCentral Show to unpack the announcement and provide much greater detail about the deployment – including its timelines and the technology that will be used.
In the interview, Mangale touches on a range of topics, including:
•What’s involved in building a submarine cable system of this magnitude;
•Why Seacom has chosen the routing for the cable that it has;
•The need for great redundancy around the African continent, and how this fed into Seacom’s planning for Seacom 2.0;
•The commercial model for the new system and what this means for the region;
•The assumptions Seacom is making about future internet demand and how that feeds into its return-on-investment forecasts;
•How the system will be funded and who is backing it;
•The risks inherent in building telecommunications infrastructure at this scale; and
•The terrestrial infrastructure that will be deployed to support Seacom 2.0, including landing stations and edge data centres.
Don’t miss a fascinating interview! TechCentral
South Africa’s payments ecosystem is evolving at a rapid pace. PayInc – previously BankservAfrica – sits at the core of the country’s payments infrastructure. As the builder and manager of the PayShap instant payment rails, PayInc is central to the Reserve Bank’s plans to drive digital inclusion through payment modernisation.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Stephen Linnell, CEO of PayInc, tells TechCentral’s Nkosinathi Ndlovu about the strategy behind the rebrand to PayInc and how that fits into the utility’s vision of the payments ecosystem in South Africa and the broader Southern Africa region.
Linnell delves into:
•PayInc’s new ownership structure with the Reserve Bank taking over 50% ownership from the private banks;
•How the Reserve Bank’s participation will help PayInc achieve its goals;
•An assessment of PayShap since its 2023 launch and what comes next;
•What the proposed inclusion of non-bank players including fintechs, retailers and telecommunications operators in the national payments and settlements system means for the economy;
•The efforts PayInc is making to implement instant payments at a regional level; and
•Emerging payment technologies like central bank digital currencies and stablecoins.
Don’t miss this informative discussion. TechCentral
Not every organisation that has migrated to the cloud has reaped the rewards promised in terms of faster development and deployment cycles, simplified infrastructure management, and most importantly, a reduction in costs.
Some are going as far as repatriating their infrastructure back into on-premises environments, perhaps because they understand it better and they find they can more reliably predict their costs there.
Deon Stroebel, chief innovation officer at cloud computing specialist LSD Open, argues against this move, saying that issues relating to cost and efficiency are better solved in the cloud than outside of it.
In this episode of TCS+, Stroebel delves into:
•The biggest mistakes companies make after migrating into the cloud;
•The real difference between just running an application on the cloud versus building it in a truly cloud-native way;
•The mindset shift that comes with cloud adoption and why on-premises thinking should not be applied in a cloud environment;
•How containerisation and DevOps help businesses make their cloud deployments more efficient;
•The cost and performance benefits of modernised cloud infrastructure;
•How to use observability tools to monitor cloud usage; and
•How ensuring their cloud environments prepare businesses to adopt new technologies like AI quickly.
This conversation is not to be missed! TechCentral
The Invigilator, the developer of a South African application that helps educational institutions monitor web-based assessments to prevent cheating, recenty secured US$11-million (R195-million) in funding to help it expand internationally.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Nicolas Riemer, co-founder and CEO of The Invigilator, joins TechCentral’s Nkosinathi Ndlovu to discuss how the start-up is going to use the cash injection to take on international markets.
He also gives insight into the app’s software and the company behind it.
In this episode, Riemer delves into:
•How The Invigilator app got started during the Covid-19 lockdown;
•The markets it plans to expand into internationally;
•The challenges of developing an app like The Invigilator in the South African market and why this may have set the company up for international success;
•How the app uses AI to minimise network and storage demands while improving outcomes;
•Barriers to The Invigilator’s adoption, like resistance from students, and how they were overcome; and
•The future technologies Riemer is most excited about in the ed-tech space.
Don’t miss the conversation! TechCentral
AI has advanced at breakneck speed in the last few years, with most knowledge workers using the technology to enhance their work in some shape or form.
Most of this computing has been happening in the cloud. However, the advent of the neural processing unit, or NPU, has made it possible to move AI computation to the edge, which not only improves speeds but also protects personal and company data.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, we were on location at the Maslow Hotel in Sandton where HP recently hosted its 2025 Future of Work event. The event brings together industry leaders, decision-makers and innovators and explores the evolving landscape of work in the age of artificial intelligence.
Ertug Ayik, vice president and MD for Middle East and Africa at HP, connects the dots between the company’s new AI-infused product line and broader concepts shaping the way in which work is being done.
Ayik delves into:
•HP’s shift from a product focused company to a solutions and services outfit;
•Why on-device AI processing capability has become a priority for HP;
•The advantages on-device AI have for performance, security and power efficiency;
•HP’s strategy for South Africa and the African continent;
•Key initiatives HP is driving across Africa; and
•What to expect from HP in the coming years.
Don’t miss the conversation! TechCentral
Paratus Group executive chairman Barney Harmse joins the TechCentral Show to share the story of the telecommunications group’s rise from small beginnings in Angola and Namibia more than 20 years ago and how it became one of Southern Africa’s biggest ICT infrastructure players.
Paratus started life in Angola in 2003, evolving from a local internet service provider into a pan‑African telecoms powerhouse. Co-founded by Harmse with Schalk Erasmus, Rolf Mendelsohn, Martin Boese and Miles October, it grew rapidly and now has infrastructure across the region, including in Zambia, Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique, the DRC and Namibia.
This week, it officially launched the first privately owned mobile network operator in Namibia, which will compete directly with the state-owned incumbents.
Today the business works closely with the likes of Starlink, Google and Meta Platforms and plays a significant role in long-distance, metropolitan and access networks across the region. It also helped land Google’s Equiano cable on the Namibian coast.
In this lively interview with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, Harmse unpacks the Paratus story, touching on:
•What building telecoms infrastructure across the vast reaches of Southern Africa has entailed, including memorable moments along the way;
•The company’s financial backers, and its capital-raising plans – including a possible future listing in New York;
•Why it built a network of long-distance fibre across Southern Africa;
•Paratus’s relationship with Elon Musk’s Starlink, and why it’s a key role player in the launch of the low-Earth orbit satellite provider’s offering across the region;
•The launch of the mobile network in Namibia and why it’s a significant development in the Paratus story; and
•The opportunities still ahead for Paratus Group.
Don’t miss a great interview! TechCentral
Maziv, the company that owns Vumatel and Dark Fibre Africa, plans to spend R12-billion over the next five years as its ramps its deployment of fibre infrastructure across South Africa.
Poised for a big injection of cash and assets from Vodacom, which is buying a 30% co-controlling stake in the business, it has unveiled big plans to deploy fibre in townships and other underserved parts of the country.
In this exclusive podcast interview, CEO Dietlof Mare unpacks Maziv’s ambitious plans with the TechCentral Show, telling TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about:
•The painful three-and-a-half years it took to get the deal over the line with the competition authorities and how these delays undermined investment in new fibre builds in South Africa;
•Why regulators need to reflect on the time it took to conclude the transaction, and why they need to be quicker in adjudicating M&A activity to grow the economy;
•How the merging parties eventually secured the approval of the Competition Commission, which had initially recommended that the transaction be blocked on competition grounds;
•Vumatel’s deployment plans – where it’s going to focus next with its new fibre builds and why;
•The economics of rolling out fibre into townships and into low-income communities, a key focus for the business over the next five years;
•What the conclusion of the deal means for the sector, including the potential for further consolidation of fibre network operators;
•The policy and regulatory changes Maziv would like to see to help it speed up the deployment of fibre in South Africa; and
•How the Maziv business is expected to change in the coming years.
Don’t miss a great discussion about the future of broadband internet infrastructure in South Africa! TechCentral
What does it really take to defend a business in an era of AI-driven attacks?
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+ ,Clare Loveridge, vice president and GM for Europe, Middle East and Africa (Emea), and Johnny Ellis, senior director of Emea channel sales, both at Arctic Wolf, go beyond the buzzwords to confront the uncomfortable truth: despite billions spent on security tools, cyber losses are still mounting.
Arctic Wolf’s answer is a different model, one that combines its artificial intelligence-powered Aurora Platform with human expertise in a concierge delivery approach. It’s a strategy that tackles the industry’s “effectiveness gap” head-on by integrating people, processes and platforms to deliver outcomes, not just alerts.
The conversation is blunt about the shifting threat landscape: AI has overtaken ransomware as the top emerging risk, and no single tool can fix it. What organisations need is visibility at every layer – from endpoints and cloud to people.
Equally compelling is Arctic Wolf’s commitment to channel-first partnerships in South Africa, ensuring trusted local expertise underpins global innovation.
From the acquisition of Cylance Endpoint to the launch of Incident Response 360, the company is pushing to redefine what operationalised security means. But the biggest takeaway is simple: cyberattacks are no longer an “if” but a “when” – and every organisation needs a plan.
Watch or listen to the full discussion to explore why Arctic Wolf believes security must move beyond tools to become a living, breathing business function – and how leaders can finally start sleeping better at night. TechCentral
Nedbank announced last week that it was acquiring Durban-based fintech iKhokha in a R1.65-billion deal that could signal the start of further consolidation in the payments industry in South Africa.
Nedbank described the deal as a “significant milestone” in its strategy to target small and medium enterprises.
iKhokha co-founder and CEO Matt Putman is TechCentral’s guest in this episode of the TechCentral Show. He unpacks the deal with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, explaining how it came about and what it means for the company’s further growth.
Founded in Durban in 2012, iKhokha provides mobile point-of-sale solutions to SMEs. Its products include card machines and a mobile app that allows merchants to accept card payments, with added business management tools.
It was founded by Putman, Ramsay Daly and Putman’s father Clive.
Putman tells the TechCentral Show about:
•How the deal with Nedbank happened;
•The origins of iKhokha and its growth over the past 13 years, leading to the sale to Nedbank – a deal that is still subject to regulatory approval;
•How iKhokha will work with Nedbank (it will remain an independent brand within the banking group), including a possible expansion into new markets in Africa; and
•The exit of iKhokha’s backers, including Crossfin Technology Holdings, Apis Partners and the International Finance Corporation.
Don’t miss a great discussion! TechCentral
Fintechs choose cloud technologies in the hopes that the efficiency and scalability of cloud computing will give them a competitive advantage. But cloud adoption is no silver bullet. If done incorrectly, a migration to the cloud can cause costs to balloon instead of decreasing them, leading to frustration and even lost revenue.
Kinetic Skunk is an Amazon Web Services-certified partner offering cloud solutions with a specialisation in fintech start-ups. In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, Donovan Mulder, CEO at Kinetic Skunk, explains the ins and outs of cloud adoption for fintech companies.
Mulder delves into:
•The importance of timing when it comes to cloud adoption and when the best time is to plan for a migration into the cloud.
•Common errors fintechs that have already migrated to the cloud make that can cause costs to balloon out of control.
•Why developers are often not the right people to handle cloud infrastructure architecting and provisioning (hint: it’s a completely different skill set).
•How gaps in cloud infrastructure architecture can lead to security holes.
•The cost optimisation tools available in the AWS cloud environment.
•How tools such as the AWS well-architected framework help fintech’s comply with regulations such as Popia and Fica.
•Advice for South African fintechs before their next cloud bill arrives.
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
Alan Knott-Craig’s new fibre internet business has been flying below the radar for some time now, but the serial telecommunications entrepreneur has finally unpacked his plans for the business.
Speaking to the TechCentral Show this week, Knott-Craig – who has led a range of well-known tech businesses, including Mxit, World of Avatar, Project Isizwe and iBurst – talks about why he believes there’s money to be made in wiring up townships with fibre and how Fibertime (stylised as “fibertime”) hopes to reach millions of data-poor South Africans who, until now, have had to rely on expensive mobile data for connectivity.
In the interview, with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, Knott-Craig also chats about:
•What’s been involved in building Fibertime;
•The Fibertime business model and the economics of township fibre;
•The network’s footprint and where the company plans to build next (it is currently deploying infrastructure in Alexandra in Johannesburg);
•Why fibre beats wireless for township internet services;
•The difficulties of working in township settings, including the threat posed by crime;
•Plans to list the business, possibly in 2027; and
•The recently approved Vodacom/Maziv deal, and what that means for the telecoms sector.
Don’t miss a fascinating interview! TechCentral
Although Shoprite Group stole a march on many of South Africa’s retailers in on-demand online grocery delivery during the Covid-19 lockdowns, Pick n Pay has a clear plan to make up lost ground and compete aggressively for market share.
Enrico Ferigolli, who co-founded the liquor delivery app Bottles – which was later acquired by Pick n Pay to form the basis of its online shopping push with asap! – joins the TechCentral Show to unpack the journey Pick n Pay is on, and how the e-commerce market is likely to develop in the coming years.
Ferigolli tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about:
Why and how technology has become fundamental to modern retail;
The launch of Bottles and what led to the Pick n Pay acquisition;
The dynamics of on-demand delivery and what it takes to be a successful player;
How Pick n Pay is working to convince people to try asap! for their grocery needs;
The role of AI (and AI agents) in future omnichannel retail environments;
How online shopping is likely to change the way Pick n Pay designs its physical stores;
Pick n Pay’s relationship with Takealot Group, and where that alliance is headed;
Pick n Pay’s plans to expand into townships and other underserved markets with on-demand deliveries; and
The threat posed by international e-commerce companies that don’t have a presence in South Africa but which ship goods to local consumers.
It’s a great interview about the future of e-commerce in South Africa – be sure not to miss it! TechCentral
In this episode of TCS+, Adil El Youssefi, newly appointed CEO of the colocation business at Cassava Technologies and CEO of Africa Data Centres, chats about the challenges and opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa.
El Youssefi delves into:
•His background prior to being appointed into the role and how it has influenced his career as a technologist;
•His personal connection to the African continent and why growing its digital economy excites him;
•The data traffic boom taking place in Africa and the drivers behind it;
•The industries fuelling the demand for data centre capacity on the continent;
•The infrastructural challenges dampening data centre growth and the different ways they are being surmounted; and
•What the future of data centres looks like in sub-Saharan Africa;
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
The Dongfeng Box electric city runabout has landed in South Africa, and Watts & Wheels has taken the vehicle – one of the cheapest electric cars currently on sale in the country – for a test drive.
One of China’s biggest and oldest motoring manufacturers, the state-owned Dongfeng Motor Corporation has identified South Africa as a key export market and, through E Auto Motor, has launched the brand in South Africa – starting with the Dongfeng Box, whose pricing begins at R460 000.
Watts & Wheels hosts William Kelly and Duncan McLeod take the Box for a drive around Johannesburg and share their thoughts on this intriguing and relatively low-cost hatchback designed for urban and city driving.
Also in this final episode of the three-part pilot season of Watts & Wheel, William and Duncan get animated about:
•The state of the EV charging infrastructure market in South Africa – and is it getting overtraded?;
•A new report on EV sales in South Africa over the next five years;
•Chery’s reporting plans to build a car plant in South Africa;
•The challenges at Mercedes-Benz South Africa’s East London production plant, especially in the light of US President Donald Trump’s tariff wars;
•Tesla’s challenge to the like of Waymo – a look at Elon Musk’s determination to win in autonomous ride-hailing services;
•Xiaomi’s beautiful YU7 and how it’s going toe-to-toe with Tesla in China;
•What’s happening at Porsche; and
•Christian Horner’s exit at Red Bull Racing.
Don’t miss this episode. TechCentral
Enviro Automotive has launched the Riddara RD6, South Africa’s first fully electric 4x4 bakkie – and Watts & Wheels has taken it for a test drive.
In episode 2 of Watts & Wheels – the brand-new South Africa motoring show from TechCentral (subscribe on YouTube) – hosts William Kelly and Duncan McLeod throw the Riddara around some corners and chat with Enviro Automotive’s Francois Malan about why the company has introduced the Geely Auto-owned brand in South Africa.
If you miss Ep 1 of Watts & Wheels, catch it here.
Also in this week’s episode of Watts & Wheels:
•Ford’s beastly new Ranger Raptor vs BYD’s Shark 6 sprint to the chequered flag (can you guess which one won?);
•What to expect at SA Auto Week in Gqeberha in October amid immense pressure on the local motor manufacturing industry;
•Why William thinks Ashok Leyland’s new “no-frills” EV truck could prove to be a big hit in South Africa;
•Huawei’s new supercar, the Maextro S800, developed in collaboration with JAC Group, and why we’re excited about it;
•Why Xiaomi’s new SU7 Ultra sportscar should have Porsche and even Rimac concerned; and
•The flying cars are here (well, kind of).
Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and never miss an episode! TechCentral
Folding phones are advancing at light speed. For consumers, the appeal is self-evident: on one hand, folding phones give them the option to have a larger, tablet-like interface that offers enhanced productivity and a better user experience. On the other hand, the fit-in-your-pocket design when folded maintains easy portability.
Samsung pioneered the folding phone category in South Africa with the first-generation Galaxy Fold in 2019. The Z Fold series is now in its seventh generation, with the Galaxy Z Fold7 and Galaxy Z Flip7 launched earlier this month.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, Zahir Cajee, mobile experience lead for product and commercial services at Samsung South Africa, talks through the design elements and software features in the newest foldables.
Cajee delves into:
•What smartphone manufacturers like Samsung are trying to achieve with foldable phones;
•The market segments Samsung’s Z Fold and Z Flip phones appeal to;
•The latest features in the new Z Fold7 and Z Flip7;
•The Z Fold7’s new 200-megapixel camera;
•Samsung’s thinking behind the introduction of the lower-cost Samsung Flip7 FE;
•The AI features in the new Galaxy Watch8; and
•When the new devices are going to be available and how much they’ll cost.
Don’t miss the discussion. TechCentral
When Nedbank realised early last year that its mammoth core banking overhaul and modernisation programme was going awry, it turned to Marijke Guest for help.
Guest, CIO of Nedbank Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) and payments and a veteran of the financial services group, tells TechCentral’s Meet the CIO about how the bank realised it was headed for trouble, and what it took to get the project back on track and delivered – all in little under a year.
According to Nedbank, the project was thought to be 80% complete, but when it was reassessed in January 2024, it became clear that only around 20% of the actual scope had been delivered.
“Designs were incomplete,” the bank said. “Engineering practices were out of date. Key components, such as the liability rates engine, product lifecycle workflows and real-time processing, were either broken or unbuilt. The programme was years behind its intended outcomes, and the bank’s reputation was at stake.”
Guest, who has worked at Nedbank for the past 25 years, tells Meet the CIO’s Duncan McLeod about:
•When and why Nedbank first decided it needed to modernise its core banking systems and what the project would entail;
•What’s involved in an undertaking like this, and why there’s potential for things to go wrong that could lead to huge cost overruns – as has happened at other South African banks that have embarked on similar modernisation programmes;
•What Nedbank’s core banking modernisation project aimed to achieve, and why it was at risk of being derailed;
•What she did to get it back on track and motivate the IT teams involved;
•What it took to get everyone to start pulling in the same direction and ensure the project was delivered on time with zero reputational impact to the bank;
•How she coped with the immense pressure she and her teams were under from the board and top management to get the project done right, on time and within budget;
•What Nedbank can do now that it couldn’t do before, and how that positions it next to its rivals – both the traditional banks and the new digital bank challengers that have emerged in recent years; and
•What CIOs who are embarking on similarly complex IT projects can learn from Nedbank’s project – including the pitfalls they should watch out for, and what areas they should be careful not to neglect.
Guest was ultimately awarded Nedbank’s Chief Executive Award for her leadership of the project. No one involved in IT management should miss this fascinating discussion! TechCentral
A recent management buyout of Britehouse from NTT Data – previously Dimension Data – has put the software development house on a new trajectory.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Duncan McLeod chats to Britehouse executive chairman Graham Parker about the MBO of Britehouse Mobility and what it means for the future of the business.
Dimension Data acquired the 60% of Britehouse it didn’t already own in a 2015 transaction, buying out shareholders that included Remgro and Convergence Partners. The IT group had held a 40% stake since 2007 before buying out other shareholders eight years later.
“Britehouse is embarking on a new era of innovation and independence following a management buyout transaction that effectively acquired the business from NTT Data,” a statement at the time said. “The acquisition from NTT Data marks a pivotal moment in Britehouse’s journey.”
Following the deal, Britehouse Mobility will operate as a fully independent company. The Britehouse brand will cease to exist inside NTT Data, but the latter will retain the enterprise applications business, with specific focus on SAP and Microsoft, it said.
“After several successful years of operating as part of the global NTT Data group, Britehouse is excited to return to its roots as an independent, South African-led business,” said Parker at the time.
Parker tells the TechCentral Show about:
•His history with Dimension Data and Britehouse;
•The story of Britehouse; and
•What the business looks like today, and management’s plans for growth.
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
This is Watts & Wheels, a new motoring show hosted by motoring journalist (and “buzzhead” – or is that “electronhead”?) William Kelly and TechCentral editor (and wannabe EV owner) Duncan McLeod.
With a focus on the shift to electric motoring, the pilot season of Watts & Wheels consists of three episodes. The focus of the show is the “lived EV experience”, with the aim of helping “dispel some of the misconceptions” about owning and driving an EV in South Africa.
What else can you expect from Watts & Wheels? We’ll look at the latest EV models – from mild hybrids to plug-in hybrids and full battery-electric vehicles – making their way to South African shores. We’ll also test drive many of them for the show.
We’ll also look at the business of motoring, and the challenges and opportunities facing the local industry amid the tectonic shifts that are remaking the global automotive sector, including the rapid rise of Chinese EV brands.
Whether you’re pondering your first EV purchase, are keen to understand the nuances of local charging networks or are simply fascinated by the future of sustainable transport, let Watts & Wheels be your guide.
In episode 1, William and Duncan dive into:
•The different types of new energy vehicles available in South Africa, explaining terms like EV, BEV, HEV, PHEV and REEV. What do they all mean, and how are prospective buyers to choose between these technologies?
•Should consumers really be worried about long-term battery health in EVs? Spoiler alert: no! In fact, the data now shows battery endurance in EVs has been vastly underestimated.
•The power of VTOL, or vehicle-to-load, technology and how it can be used to power everything from a kettle to your house.
•The electrification of bakkies, including a look at BYD’s exciting new Shark 6 PHEV (and whether it can beat the monstrous 3l Ford Raptor from a standing start to 100km/h); Nissan’s sexy Frontier PHEV (not confirmed for South Africa); and Ford’s new PHEV Ranger (made in Silverton in Pretoria).
•The controversial Jaguar Type 00 – and why William thinks why the critics have it completely wrong.
If you like what you see, please subscribe to Watts & Wheels on YouTube – and share the word with family and friends. It’s also available as an audio podcast in your favourite podcasting app.
In episode 2, out next week, look out for an exclusive look at – and first media test drive of – South Africa’s first 4x4 fully electric bakkie. TechCentral
IT security breaches are on the rise in South Africa and worldwide, and with AI tools at their disposal, criminals are scaling up their attacks.
With the risk of attack so high, organisations are forced to look beyond beefing up security – they must prepare for the unfortunate event where their systems are, in fact, breached. One way to do this is to learn from those organisations whose systems have been breached in the past.
This episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, the third in a series of three with First Distribution on how to manage cyber crises – watch episodes 1 and 2 here – sees Microsoft portfolio manager at First Distribution Kejen Pillay back to share more insight on this topic.
Pillay discusses various lessons from:
-The TransUnion breach of March 2022, where 5.2 million records were compromised and a US$15-million ransom demanded;
-The CIPC hack of February 2024 and the media furore that ensued; and
-The National Health Laboratory Services breach of June 2024.
Don’t miss this important discussion. TechCentral
In cybersecurity, prevention is always better than cure. However, organisations have to prepare for the worst-case scenario, one where their systems are breached by cybercriminals.
This is the second in a series of three podcasts on how to manage cyber crises effectively when they happen. The first episode – watch it here – centred on defining what a cyber crisis is and the different ways cybercriminals exploit an organisation.
In episode 2, Kejen Pillay, portfolio manager for Microsoft at First Distribution, discusses the strategies and tools organisations use to craft an effective crisis response plan.
Pillay delves into:
•The elements of an effective crisis response plan;
•The Microsoft tools businesses can use to prepare for a cyber crisis;
•Backups and other tools that aid in the speedy recovery of operations following a cyber crisis;
•The importance of training non-IT staff on what to do in a cyber crisis;
•How AI tools can help protect organisations; and
•Advice for organisations wanting to begin crafting their cyber crisis response plan.
Don’t miss the discussion. TechCentral
In today's hyperconnected society, a cybersecurity crisis isn’t just a technical glitch; it's a profound disruption that can bring businesses, governments and even entire countries to a halt.
For organisations to protect themselves effectively, they must understand what cybercriminals are capable of, where the vulnerabilities in their own systems are and – most importantly – be prepared for the worst-case scenario where their systems are breached.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, Kejen Pillay, Microsoft portfolio manager at First Distribution, discusses the anatomy of a cyber crisis and how businesses should prepare for it.
Pillay delves into:
• The difference between a cyberthreat and a cyber crisis;
•How cybercriminals are using AI tools to develop increasingly sophisticated methods of attack;
•How organisations can keep pace with the rapid changes in the threat landscape to keep their systems secure;
•The difference between a crisis management plan and an incident response plan;
•Some common errors businesses make when responding to a cyber crisis; and
•What South Africa’s leading organisations are doing to prepare for a cyber crisis.
This informative show is not to be missed.
* TCS+ episodes are sponsored TechCentral
Data is like oxygen in the digital era, and people are using more of it. In 2025 alone, global mobile data usage is projected to reach 200 exabytes per month. That is 200 billion gigabytes of data consumed monthly by everything from high-definition video streaming to online gaming and IoT.
This trend has implications for infrastructure – in the home, in business and even in shared outdoor spaces. For the people consuming the data, connecting with ease as they migrate between different environments is paramount; but so is the privacy and integrity of their personal data.
In this episode of TCS+, Vox Wi-Fi product manager Craig Blignaut discusses the trends in data consumption, their drivers and how Wi-Fi technology is evolving to meet people’s needs.
Blignaut delves into:
•Why data has become the lifeblood of modern society;
•How newer technologies like generative AI are shaping trends in data consumption;
•The different ways people gain access to the internet;
•How Wi-Fi has contributed to making the internet cheaper and more accessible;
•How an enterprise’s Wi-Fi experience contributes to how visitors experience a company’s brand; and
•The role is AI playing in enhancing network connectivity.
Don’t miss an informative discussion. TechCentral
Samsung Electronics recently launched the latest line-up of its popular Galaxy A-series of midtier smartphones, with the A26, A36 and A56 replacing the older A25, A35 and A55 models.
One of the most notable new features of the A-series is a curated artificial intelligence module, dubbed Awesome Intelligence, that brings powerful AI features previously exclusive to its top-tier Galaxy S-series phones to its midrange devices for the first time.
Unique to the A-series is a new safety feature called Samsung SOS+, a free-to-use, 24/7 subscription service exclusive to owners of the new Galaxy A56, A36 and A26 devices.
In an emergency situation – and on-demand – the service immediately geolocates the user and sends private security and medical emergency services to their location at the press of a button.
In this episode of TCS+, Justin Hume, vice president for mobile at Samsung Electronics South Africa, tells TechCentral about how SOS+ works in the new Galaxy A-series line-up.
Hume delves into:
•The inspiration behind SOS+ and why Samsung has chosen the A series to pilot the service;
•How the service works and its benefits for A-series smartphone users;
•Why the service is currently limited to users of the A56, A36 and A26 devices and Samsung’s plans for expanded roll-out;
•Key features that set the SOS+ service apart; and
•Why Samsung has chosen Aura as its partner in providing the SOS+ service.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion! TechCentral
For years, mobile telecommunications was dominated by a handful of large operators, or MNOs. Now, with almost 30 MVNOs, or mobile virtual network operators, serving niche consumer bases in banking, retail and education, among other sectors, the MVNO market is thriving.
However, brands looking to take advantage of this boom and add mobile services to their offerings are not guaranteed success. There are several critical decisions regarding strategy, process and choosing the right technology platform that are key to building a critical mass of loyal MVNO customers.
In this episode of TCS+, Daniel Swart, chief commercial officer at MVNX, an MVNO enablement specialist, discusses the opportunities and threats facing MVNOs in South Africa today.
Swart Delves into:
•The services MVNX, as an MVNO enabler, offers to brands looking to launch MVNO services in South Africa;
•How South Africa’s MVNO market has developed since its inception in 2006 with the entry of now-defunct Virgin Mobile;
•The markers of success separating successful MVNOs from those that have struggled to gain a foothold in the market;
•The benefits MVNO brands reap from using an enablement platform to launch and distribute their mobile services;
•The importance of understanding the competitive dynamics of the MVNO market and how new MVNOs should position themselves;
•The regulatory aspects of running an MVNO; and
•International MVNO trends Swart believes are likely to be emulated in South Africa.
This discussion is not to be missed. TechCentral
The Lekker Network is a recently launched global business platform designed to help South African expatriates find business and investment opportunities around the world, including at home.
Founded by a group of well-known businesspeople, The Lekker Network was launched in March and offers members access to a business directory, a jobs portal (for employers and job seekers), a social platform with “likeminded individuals” and events around the world for people, including non-South Africans, to meet up.
Renier Lombard, a co-founder of The Lekker Network, is our guest on this episode of the TechCentral Show. He said the platform, whose ambassadors include well-known journalist and speaker Bruce Whitfield and former Springbok and now businessman Bob Skinstad, is designed to “forge connections between South African businesses and businesspeople, regardless of their location”.
In this episode of TCS, Lombard unpacks:
•Who founded The Lekker Network and why;
•Who it is aimed at and who can join;
•How much it costs and what members get for the fee;
•The markets where The Lekker Network is focused – not surprisingly, the attention is on countries where there are a large number of South African expats;
•How (and why) non-South Africans can join the network; and
•The importance of the tech sector, including start-ups, to The Lekker Network community.
Don’t miss the interview! TechCentral
This is the fourth episode of a new podcast series curated by TechCentral’s editorial team and generated by artificial intelligence tools. It’s an experiment that’s in beta for now, but if it works well, we’ll consider making it a regular feature by launching a season 1.
In this episode, we highlight some of the biggest technology news stories from South Africa and the world over the last week, as covered by TechCentral.
Note that even using the most accurate and reliable sources, AI can and will occasionally make mistakes.
In this episode, we look at:
•Takealot’s talks about hiring thousands of retrenched Post Office employees to support its e-commerce expansion plans;
•Why South Africans’ use of cash is costing the economy billions of rand a year, according to the Reserve Bank;
•City Power’s plan to roll out electric vehicle charging stations in Johannesburg;
•The Internet Service Providers’ Association’s view of communications minister Solly Malatsi’s plan to introduce equity equivalence in licensing in the ICT sector;
•Intel’s pivot to the “14A” manufacturing technology and what it means in its fight with TSMC for foundry customers;
•Bank Zero’s sale to Lesaka Technologies; and
•The mental health impact of AI chatbots.
Again, this podcast is experimental. We welcome your feedback. Would you like this podcast to become a regular feature? Is there anything you’d like us to improve? Is it too short or too long? Drop us a line at nexus@techcentral.co.za. TechCentral
The pace of innovation in the cloud space is breathtaking. Gone are the days when the cloud was just about virtual machines and storage; today, it is a dynamic ecosystem, constantly introducing features that are fundamentally transforming how businesses operate, from the smallest start-ups to the largest enterprises.
Preegan Chetty, Azure product manager at First Distribution, returns to TechCentral’s TCS+ to discuss some of the latest and most exciting features available in the Azure cloud environment and how businesses are leveraging those capabilities to facilitate growth.
This is the third in a series of three episodes with Chetty and First Distribution. Episode one covered cloud cost optimisation in Azure and episode two looked at how businesses can manage the complexities of data residency in hybrid cloud environments.
In this episode, Chetty delves into:
•The benefits cloud-based IT environments offer over on-prem installations and how they help companies experiment and adopt new technologies faster;
•How businesses can ensure they are able to keep pace with new technologies so they are not left behind;
•How South African businesses are using the newest AI tools in Azure to build new products and services;
•How to approach responsible AI development in the cloud;
•How cloud AI tools can help with code modernisation;
•How small businesses can take advantage of cloud technology; and
•Emerging cloud technologies to keep an eye on.
This discussion is not to be missed. TechCentral
Data is the lifeblood of every organisation, driving innovation, enhancing customer experiences and influencing strategic decisions.
But managing this invaluable asset has never been more challenging. Hybrid IT environments – where some organisational data sits in the cloud other data resides in on-premises infrastructure – only adds to this complexity.
In this second episode in a series of three delving into the ins and outs of Azure cloud deployments, Preegan Chetty, Azure product manager at First Distribution, discusses the data governance procedures that ensure organisational data is stored in the most useful, cost-effective and compliant ways.
The first episode centred on effective cost management techniques for the Azure cloud environment. You can watch that episode here.
In this episode, Chetty delves into:
•Why the complexity of data governance increases when organisations migrate from on-premises to hybrid cloud environments;
•The factors organisations should consider when deciding which data they should keep where;
•What Dora legislation is and how it affects the hybrid data strategies of South African organisations;
•Other legislation impacting data governance in South Africa;
•The tools Azure provides to help data architects structure distributed data in ways that do not have a negative impact on performance;
•Data governance for disaster recovery; and
•The impact data governance decisions have on an organisation’s cloud costs.
Don’t miss an informative discussion! TechCentral
Organisations are flocking to the cloud for its agility, scalability and innovation potential. But while the cloud promises big things, it also presents a set of financial challenges.
Many businesses find their cloud bills spiralling out of control, eroding the very benefits they sought in the first place.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, Preegan Chetty, Microsoft Azure product manager at First Distribution, discusses the tools Azure provides for effective cost management and how businesses can take advantage of them to get the most out their cloud deployments without breaking the bank.
Chetty delves into:
•Some of the common pitfalls or hidden costs that organisations encounter when moving their workloads into the cloud and how to mitigate against these;
•The different pricing models available in Azure and how organisations can leverage them;
•What FinOps is and how businesses can benefit from it;
•How organisational KPIs can be leveraged to manage cloud spending effectively;
•How tagging can aid in cost centre management;
•How to manage costs in more complex hybrid cloud environments; and
•The AI tools Azure offers to aid businesses in managing their costs.
This episode is not to be missed. TechCentral
The digitisation of social interactions has made it easier for people to maintain contact and build online communities. However, there has been a decrease in in-person interaction that has contributed to a sense of disconnect.
South African-made social media platform Sociable hopes to solve this problem by combining online engagement with in-person meetups, connecting people based on shared interests.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Sociable co-founder and CEO Jason van Dyk tells TechCentral’s Nathi Ndlovu about the importance of community and how Sociable is helping drive its development.
In the show, Van Dyk delves into:
•How community builders benefit from using the Sociable platform;
•The features Sociable provides to communities and their members to enhance engagement;
•How meeting spaces including coffee shops, bars and restaurants benefit from the in-person component of Sociable’s community meetups;
•Sociable’s approach to safety for its users;
•How Sociable positions itself against large social media platforms like Facebook;
•Some of the most popular communities on the platform; and
•The impact of AI on the social media landscape.
Don’t miss the conversation! TechCentral
This is the third episode of a new podcast series curated by TechCentral’s editorial team and generated by artificial intelligence tools. It’s an experiment that’s in beta for now, but if it works well, we’ll consider making it a regular feature by launching a season 1.
Note that even using the most accurate and reliable sources, AI can and will occasionally make mistakes.
In this episode, we highlight some of the biggest technology news stories from South Africa and the world over the last week, as covered by TechCentral.
In this episode, we look at:
•Takealot Group’s strong top-line performance;
•The profit surge at Prosus and what’s driving it;
•The over-capacity crisis hitting China’s motoring industry;
•How Oracle, a dowdy database developer, got a new lease on life;
•Jaltech’s decision to back solar specialist Wetility; and
•The State IT Agency hits back at its critics in government;
Again, this podcast is experimental. We welcome your feedback. Would you like this podcast to become a regular feature? Is there anything you’d like us to improve? Is it too short or too long? Drop us a line at nexus@techcentral.co.za. TechCentral
Spar Group is determined to play a significant role in the on-demand grocery delivery space in South Africa despite coming from behind, its omnichannel executive for Southern Africa has told TechCentral.
Speaking to the TechCentral Show, Blake Raubenheimer took the publication’s editor, Duncan McLeod, through the retailer’s plan to compete directly with the likes of Shoprite Holdings’ Sixty60, which gained an early market lead during the Covid lockdowns.
Spar has every intention of becoming a meaningful player in app-based on-demand deliveries, according to Raubenheimer, who unpacked the retailer’s plan to gain market share in the increasingly competitive but fast-expanding segment with Spar2U.
South Africa’s grocery sector has become increasingly competitive as price-conscious consumers look for value, convenience and distinctive products.
Shoprite and Woolworths are keeping their rivals on their toes as they continue to sign up customers. Pick n Pay, which is also coming from behind, is aggressively targeting the space, too.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Raubenheimer discusses:
How Spar’s business model – the vast majority of stores are run by franchisees – has complicated its move into the on-demand grocery game, and how it's working to turn this to its advantage;
How Spar is working to convince consumers to try Spar2U over other on-demand services;
The group’s broader omnichannel strategy, where the retailer is positioned in the market, where it wants to get to, and how it plans to do it;
Its focus on the township and rural markets through partnerships with companies like KasiD and Delivery Ka Speed – and why it’s important;
Spar’s partnership with Uber Eats;
How Spar’s SAP enterprise software implementation in KwaZulu-Natal went awry and how it impacted the retailer; and
What Spar is working on from a technology perspective.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion about how technology is transforming the retail industry in South Africa. TechCentral
Many municipalities in South Africa are struggling to maintain a reliable supply of clean water to households and industries. Thankfully, technology is here to help.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, Helen Hulett, newly appointed chief sustainability officer at geospatial information science specialist AfriGIS, tells Duncan McLeod about the Resolve Water project that she leads and how she and her team are working with businesses and municipalities to try to address a problem that has reached crisis levels in some parts of the country.
AfriGIS’s technology is able to have a real-world impact on this crisis, according to Hulett, who specialises in industrial water risk, water-related governance and social issues, and sustainability.
Hulett, who has consulted with leading companies on the topic – they include the likes of Coca-Cola, Illovo Sugar Africa, Sappi, Aspen Pharmacare and Sasol – said AfriGIS offers advanced mapping and data analytics tools to address water scarcity, improve resource management and support businesses in need.
In this episode of TCS+, Hulett also unpacks:
•Her background and why she took the role of chief sustainability officer at AfriGIS;
•What the field of geospatial information science involves and why it makes sense to apply it to this crisis;
•AfriGIS’s involvement in the Resolve Water project;
•How serious the water crisis really is in South Africa and what it will take to address it;
•The impact of the Resolve Water project so far, and how it’s using GIS technology to achieve its goals – including mapping, real-time data analytics and collaborative partnerships; and
•The role of artificial intelligence.
The interview with Hulett, who is passionate about the topic of water security in South Africa, is not to be missed. TechCentral
This is the second (and beta) episode of a new podcast series curated by TechCentral’s editorial team and generated by artificial intelligence tools. It’s an experiment for now, but if it works well, we’ll consider making it a regular feature by launching a season 1.
Note that even using the most accurate and reliable sources, AI can and will occasionally make mistakes.
In this episode, we highlight several key developments in South Africa's ICT sector, including the intense capex competition among Vodacom, MTN and Telkom that reveals a fierce battle for network supremacy and market share within the mobile telecommunications sector.
Concurrently, the surge in mobile virtual network operators is reshaping the South African mobile market, also fostering increased competition and delivering specialised offerings for consumers.
Also this week: an uproar over home affairs' proposed database fee increases; the proliferation of Starlink and other low-Earth orbit satellites present a significant threat to radio astronomy in the Karoo; and AI comes to Wimbledon.
Again, this is experimental. We welcome your feedback. Would you like this podcast to become a regular feature? Is there anything you’d like us to improve? Is it too short or too long? Drop us a line at nexus@techcentral.co.za. TechCentral
This is the first (and beta) episode of a new podcast series curated by TechCentral's editorial team and generated by artificial intelligence tools. It's an experiment for now, but if it works well, we'll make it a regular feature.
Note that even using the most accurate and reliable sources (human-generated articles from TechCentral and other reliable media sources), AI can and does make mistakes.
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What should one make of the noise surrounding the licensing (or non-licensing) of Starlink in South Africa? And what of the plans to reform the rules around black economic empowerment in the sector?
To make sense of these developments – and others – TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod sat down this week with Nomvuyiso Batyi, CEO of the Association for Comms & Technology (ACT), an industry body that represents South Africa’s six largest telecommunications operators: MTN, Telkom, Vodacom, Rain, Liquid Intelligent Technologies and Cell C.
In the interview, for the TechCentral Show, Batyi unpacked communications minister Solly Malatsi’s draft policy directive to communications regulator Icasa on so-called “equity equivalents” and why ACT believes there needs to be fairness in the licensing process. If the new rules apply to satellite operators, she said, they should apply to all licensees in the sector equally, including the big telecoms operators ACT represents.
In the show, she also discussed:
•Whether Starlink – and other low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite internet companies pose a threat or an opportunity for South Africa’s network operators;
•The role of LEO satellite operators in South Africa’s future telecommunications mix – and can they help bridge the digital divide?;
•The latest on the planned switch-off of 2G and 3G networks in South Africa, and why 3G will be the first to go;
•Whether national treasury’s recent move to cut ad valorem tax on basic smartphones goes far enough – and what other measures ACT would like to see to get smartphones in the hands of everyone in South Africa; and
•What is happening regarding the next spectrum auction.
Don’t miss a great discussion! TechCentral
Mobile money has an increasingly vital role to play in South Africa’s economy, despite the fact that the country boasts an advanced financial services sector.
That’s the view of Kagiso Mothibi, CEO of Fintech at MTN South Africa, who was sharing his views in a recent interview with TechCentral’s TCS+ (watch it below) in which he discusses the broader fintech vision for the network operator and its role in driving innovation across the group.
But what is it about mobile money services that is attracting South African consumers to products like MTN’s MoMo, and what role do these platforms fulfil in the broader financial services ecosystem?
Mothibi unpacks this in detail in the interview. He also discusses:
•Why South Africa has proved to be a tougher mobile money market to crack than many other countries in Africa;
•How the South African market differs from others in which MTN operates;
•Who the target market is for MoMo – is it the unbanked and underbanked, or does MTN also have plans to serve well-heeled customers, too?
•What’s driving the growth in MoMo services in South Africa and why;
•What MTN’s fintech portfolio houses today and the company’s plans to expand this in the coming years;
•The recent launched of MoMo Pay, how it works and how MTN is onboarding merchants;
•What pain points MoMo Pay addresses in the payments ecosystem; and
•What the future holds for the fintech business in South Africa – and how product innovation locally is being deployed in other MTN markets across the continent.
Don’t miss an exciting interview! TechCentral
Forget the hype, embrace the revolution! In this episode of TCS+, TechCentral speaks with Workday South Africa country manager Kiv Moodley and manager of solutions consulting Jannie Malan to dissect the critical intersection of artificial intelligence and human potential.
Malan oversees the solution consulting team, engaging with prospects and clients to understand their challenges and demonstrate how Workday’s technology can enable them to achieve their vision.
Both Moodley and Malan, who coincidentally joined Workday on the very day its South African office launched in 2018, brought seven years of frontline experience to the discussion, proving that AI isn't just a buzzword – it's already shaping our world.
TCS+ host Jaydev Chiba sat down with the two men to discuss the topic of “Human by design: real-world AI, real human impact”.
Experts note that AI, like other technologies, might be overestimated in the short term but underestimated in the long term. Overcoming initial apprehension requires understanding what AI is, and understanding helps reveal its potential to allow humans to be more productive and efficient. AI is not a silver bullet; its value is realised when it’s embedded, understood and utilised effectively.
The conversation highlighted several use cases, both personal and within business. Examples ranged from leveraging tools like Grok, ChatGPT and Gemini for productivity, and even a 10-year-old programming Alexa to tell a puppy it’s mealtime. Another use case included using AI for creating a training curriculum and visuals. Moodley and Malan noted that AI is already embedded in daily life through GPS, search and recommendations.
For businesses, a key trend is using AI to improve employee productivity by automating repetitive and mundane tasks, giving people more time for higher-value work. Industries show different levels of adoption, from logistics using AI for warehouse safety, to healthcare for diagnosis and treatment development, and insurance for fraud detection and client profiling. This shift shows value emerging as industries figure out where AI provides maximum benefit.
A significant portion of the discussion focused on the critical need for ethical and responsible AI use. With organisations facing pressure to adopt AI, establishing AI governance is foundational.
This involves potentially creating AI governance roles, executive sponsorship, governance committees and risk matrices to manage data privacy, bias and transparency. The Workday executives stressed the importance of AI functioning within a larger technology framework, requiring organisations to address data quality, security and accessibility.
Critically, the concept of keeping the human in the loop was emphasised, ensuring humans make final decisions based on AI-surfaced insights. Workday itself champions transparency, providing fact sheets or model cards to explain its AI models and how data is leveraged and bias mitigated. TechCentral
Altron Group announced last week that it was selling its Altron Nexus business in a management buyout led by Nexus MD Louis du Toit and BriteGaze founder and technology entrepreneur Reshaad Sha.
Sha and Du Toit are our guests in this episode of the TechCentral Show, where they tell TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the acquisition and their plans for the business.
As part of the acquisition – which is still subject to the fulfilment of certain conditions, which should be concluded by the end of June – Altron Nexus will be rebranded as Sentiv, a portmanteau of “sentient” and “intuitive”.
Sha will serve as Sentiv’s executive chairman while Du Toit will be CEO.
“Together they will steer Sentiv’s transformation into a future-orientated technology partner offering intelligent, context-aware, mission-critical communications and industrial internet-of-things solutions,” according to a statement from the acquiring parties.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Du Toit and Sha explore:
•How the deal came about;
•The assets and businesses housed in Altron Nexus; and
•The plan to turn the loss-making business around.
Don’t miss a great conversation! TechCentral
TechCentral’s guests in this episode of the TechCentral Show believe Blue Label Telecoms and its affiliate (and soon to be subsidiary) Cell C present a compelling investment case.
Philip Short, global portfolio manager at Flagship Asset Management – which counts Blue label as its sole South African investment – and Dylan Bradfield, portfolio manager at Sharenet, tell TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod that they believe the turnaround taking place at Cell C is real, and will have a meaningful impact on Blue Label shares.
Blue shares, which have already rallied strongly – which have more than doubled in the past six months – could still have plenty of room to run, according to Short.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Short and Bradfield unpack:
•Blue Label’s announcement earlier this month that it is considering a JSE listing for Cell C;
•Why Cell C’s restructured operating model and strategy makes sense, and why that’s good news for Blue Label shareholders;
•The role of Cell C CEO Jorge Mendes in the turnaround – and what the opportunity is for the mobile operator with its new “asset-light” model of running its network – management of its radio access network has effectively been outsourced to partners (and competitors) MTN and Vodacom;
•Which operators would be most vulnerable to a resurgent Cell C;
•The importance of Cell C’s strategy around mobile virtual network operators and the significance of its relationship with Capitec;
•The move by Blue Label to sell Comm Equipment Company to Cell C – good move or not?
•Whether Cell C can compete with Telkom, Vodacom and MTN in the business market, something Mendes has signalled his desire to do;
•What the listing of Cell C could look like, what management’s focus should be before the listing and what kind of valuation the business could attract; and
•How much more value could be unlocked for Blue Label shareholders.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion! TechCentral
This episode of TCS+ is the third in a series of three focused on the relationship between Switchcom Distribution and Huawei eKit as well as the networking solutions the two companies are providing for SMEs in South Africa and the rest of Africa.
Dewald van Eck, networking engineer at Switchcom parent company CMVAS, and Kurt Anthony, support engineer at CMVAS, tell TechCentral’s TCS+ about their hands-on experience working with Huawei eKit in customer implementations.
In this episode, Anthony and Van Eck delve into:
•How the Huawei eKit benefits the network operations manager when implementing networking projects;
•The problems the eKit solution solves for SMEs;
•How the eKit streamlines the network setup process for SMEs;
•Real-world examples of the how the eKit has helped SMEs on the ground; and
•Some of the common challenges faced when supporting SMEs during project implementations.
Don’t miss an informative discussion. TechCentral
4Sight Holdings has turned the corner and has signalled this with a recent move from the AltX to the main board of the JSE.
CEO Tertius Zitzke is our guest in this episode of the TechCentral Show. He tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the turnaround he’s leading – not to mention the mess he inherited when he took over leadership of the business in December 2019, months before Covid hit.
4Sight has been operating largely below the radar, but the investment community has begun paying attention – and, although the shares been moving sideways for the past year, over three years they have climbed by 250%.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Zitzke unpacks:
•What motivated the decision to move to the JSE’s main board;
•His background, including his leadership AccTech Systems, its acquisition by 4Sight and how he became CEO of the group;
•Why the business was listed originally, and how its focus has changed under his leadership;
•How the turnaround was achieved – and what still needs to be done;
•Where 4Sight fits into the ICT market in South Africa;
•The recent acquisition of XFour Group and plans for more acquisitions; and
•What’s next for 4Sight.
Don’t miss an interesting discussion! TechCentral
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, we chat to Clive Roberts, the consumer packaged goods (CPG) segment leader for anglophone Africa at Schneider Electric.
In this discussion, Roberts unpacks the focus of the company’s segment, which covers the dynamic food and beverage industry across 24 African nations, encompassing about 1 800 manufacturers.
The sector is driven by converging trends, notably in smart manufacturing and a strong emphasis on sustainability, including waste reduction and energy efficiency. Simultaneously, evolving consumer preferences for healthier options, ingredient transparency and diverse dietary needs demand agility and resilience from these manufacturers. Cost management remains a critical focus.
The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation, as manufacturers focused on automation and better system integration to ensure business continuity. Further challenges, such as load shedding and water curtailment, shifted the focus towards power resilience, prompting investments in solutions such as industrial UPS systems.
Sustainability is a key concern, particularly for EU-headquartered companies. Manufacturers are actively working to reduce their scope-1, -2, and -3 emissions through initiatives like integrating distributed energy resources, optimising energy use and implementing variable process control.
Changing consumer behaviours, driven by social media and e-commerce, are demanding rapid access to goods and direct engagement with brands. This requires efficient supply chains and agile digital systems for both inventory and logistics management. Manufacturers will need flexible production and advanced tracking capabilities to meet the demand for visibility and diverse product options.
Economic recovery post-Covid-19 relies on the continued adoption of digital transformation to enhance efficiency and predictability in manufacturers’ processes. Schneider Electric is focused on providing hardware-agnostic integration, supported by organisations like the Universal Automation Organisation, to help manufacturers integrate existing equipment for unified control and accelerate digital transformation initiatives.
Government policies, like the sugar tax, directly influence product innovation and reformulation, often requiring significant investment. Despite challenges, growth opportunities exist for companies that prioritise product quality, traceability and building consumer trust, potentially also allowing them to command premium prices.
Roberts emphasised the value of early engagement with companies like Schneider Electric for expert guidance. He stressed that sustainability should be integral to operations and invited stakeholders to explore Schneider Electric’s offerings. The anglophone African food and beverage sector is a dynamic industry, and embracing technological advancements, prioritising consumer needs and ensuring product integrity are key to future success, he said in the interview.
Don’t miss it! TechCentral
One of South Africa’s responsibilities as president of the global Group of 20 (G20) nations in 2025 is to hosting the G20 TechSprint, an event that invites innovators from around the world to develop financial solutions that solve the most pressing challenges faced by central banks.
The South African Reserve Bank is hosting this year’s TechSprint in collaboration with the Bank for International Settlements.
Lyle Horsley, head of fintech at the Reserve Bank, joined TechCentral’s Nkosinathi Ndlovu on the TechCentral Show to talk about the competition and other initiatives spearheaded by Bank under the G20 banner.
In this episode of the show, Horsley delves into:
The history of the G20 TechSprint and some of the solutions developed in previous iterations of the competition;
The problem statements entrants are required to centre their solutions on;
How central banks balance the often-opposing concerns of innovation on one hand and strong regulation on the other;
How digital identity and the principles of open finance are critical to digitised financial systems;
How the global central banking community will help winners develop and scale their solutions; and
Details about the format of the TechSprint, how to participate and the prizes up for grabs.
Don’t miss an interesting discussion! TechCentral
Boasting 1.6 million subscribers after less than three years in the market, Capitec Connect has quickly become South Africa’s largest MVNO – and it has an ambitious plan for further growth.
Dalene Steyn, head of Capitec Connect, tells the TechCentral Show (TCS) that the MVNO – or mobile virtual network operator – market in South Africa is poised for further expansion as banks, retailers and other brands muscle into the mobile business through wholesale partnerships with network operators.
According to Steyn, although Capitec Connect is not a loss leader for the bank, the focus for now is building a critical mass of subscribers from Capitec Bank’s customer base – Capitec Connect users must be bank clients to sign up for the service.
In the interview, Steyn tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about:
•Why Capitec Connect recently cut its prices, matching another MVNO, Afrihost AirMobile, as the cheapest MVNO provider in South Africa – spoiler: it’s all about building scale;
•Why Capitec is pulling ahead in the MVNO market and how big the bank wants to be in mobile – and why it’s so important to its business;
•Capitec Connect’s plans to introduce post-paid contracts later this year and how this aligns with its push into business banking services;
•The company’s plans for device financing;
•Its relationship with Cell C, whose network it uses to provide mobile services to its clients, and why it’s pleased with the relationship; and
•The unconfirmed market talk that Capitec might buy a strategic equity stake in Cell C.
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
Schalk Visser has worked in telecommunications for more than 20 years, first at Telkom, then at Vodacom and now at Cell C, where he has served as chief information and technology officer since 2020.
Visser, an engineer, joined Cell C 13 years ago – during the tenure of former CEO Alan Knott-Craig – as an executive in the company’s programme management office, where he helped lead a renewal of its radio access network.
TechCentral’s guest in the latest episode of the publication’s Meet the CIO podcast, Visser tells host Duncan McLeod about his career journey in telecoms before delving into his work in helping transform Cell C’s technology stack – with a focus on recent years as the operator moved to shut down its own radio access network in favour of partnerships with other mobile operators.
In the interview, Visser chats about:
•Where his interest in technology began;
•His time with Telkom and Vodacom, including his experience helping build Vodacom’s network in Mozambique;
•The changes that have occurred at Cell C in recent years and why they’re significant – including a look at the network partnership with MTN and Vodacom, and what that’s allowed the company to do differently;
•His day-to-day role as head of technology at Cell C;
•The role of technology in supporting what is essentially a technology business;
•The changes he has brought to Cell C’s technology stack and why;
•The recent ransomware attack – what happened, and what’s been done to address it; and
•What’s exciting him about what’s coming down the line in telecoms technology.
Don’t miss a great interview! TechCentral
Cape Town-based fintech start-up Stitch last month caught the attention of many people when it announced it was raising R1-billion (US$55-million) in a significant series-B funding round.
Co-founder and CEO Kiaan Pillay is our guest in this episode of the TechCentral Show, where he tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the funding round, which was led by QED Investors with participation from a range of new and existing investors.
The latest round brings Stitch’s total funding to date to nearly R2-billion, or $107-million.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Pillay unpacks:
•His background and why and how Stitch was founded;
•How well-known South African comedian Trevor Noah became one of the participating funders in the latest funding round;
•What Stitch is doing differently to other fintech and payment start-ups that has allowed to raise the quantum of funding that it has;
•The significance of Stitch’s recent acquisition of Exipay – and why it’s important for Stitch to be a player in the in-person payments market;
•Stitch’s plans in the cryptocurrency space; and
•Why the company is focused (for now) on the South African market.
Don’t miss a great discussion! TechCentral
Networking equipment wholesaler Switchcom Distribution has partnered with Huawei Technologies to bring new offerings to the South African market and elsewhere in Africa.
In the first episode of this series, Switchcom national sales manager Lynton Brits and Huawei account manager Tanki Lebatla told TCS+ about the rationale behind the partnership and some of the networking and backup power equipment the companies have on offer. That video is available here.
In this second episode of the series, Brits is back on TCS+, this time accompanied by Jan Keyser, CEO of Konnekt SP, a provider of networking solutions to small and medium enterprises.
In this episode of TCS+, Brits and Keyser delve into:
•Why networking solutions providers and small and medium enterprises are draw to the Huawei networking eKit distributed by Switchcom;
•The different types of networking equipment that comes with the eKit solution;
•The software support Huawei provides to make network configuration easier for engineers using the eKit;
•The advantages of purchasing a homogenous solution from the same brand in making network configuration easier for installers; and
•Tools for managing the software-defined networks deployed using the eKit as customer need evolve over time.
This insightful conversation is not to be missed, especially for SMEs looking for networking solutions and the vendors who install them. TechCentral
Shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Tiffany Dunsdon – at the time CEO of JSE-listed Adapt IT – found herself having to fend off an unwanted takeover bid from Huge Group.
Dunsdon did not feel the deal made much sense for Adapt IT – a fast-growing enterprise software services provider whose share price, like many others at the time, had been knocked lower by the uncertainty caused by the pandemic.
The Huge Group approach was opportunistic, said Dunsdon.
So, instead of entertaining the approach from Huge Group, she set about engineering a very different deal: one involving Canadian-listed Constellation Software: Constellation subsidiary Volaris Group would buy out Adapt IT and delist it from the JSE.
Dunsdon, who was recently appointed as acquiring group leader at Omegro – a portfolio company within Volaris Group that houses Adapt IT – joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show for an update following the conclusion of the sale.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Dunsdon also discusses:
•Adapt IT’s performance since its acquisition and delisting;
•The Huge Group hostile approach and how that played out inside Adapt IT;
•The timeline of events that led to the acquisition by Volaris Group; and
•What’s next for Adapt IT and Omegro.
Don’t miss the conversation! TechCentral
New GX Capital, one of the principal investors in Vumatel and Dark Fibre Africa parent CIVH, recently announced it was launching a R2.4-billion clean-tech investment fund in partnership with RMB Ventures.
To unpack the details of the new fund and why it’s being established, New GX Capital founder and CEO Khudusela Pitje joined TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod in the latest episode of the TechCentral Show for a wide-ranging conversation.
In the interview, Pitje chatted about the fund – called the Airnegize Capital Fund – and its plans to invest in renewable energy and water and gas infrastructure across Africa.
New GX Capital and RMB Ventures have described the fund as “one of the largest of its kind on the continent”.
The fund has secured R2.4-billion in initial commitments, with the companies targeting a further R1.6-billion before financial close in the coming months.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Pitje expands on:
•His career background and the formation of New GX Capital;
•The role his father, the late HM Pitje, a businessman and former mayor of Mamelodi, played in his life and career choices;
•His role in helping build Dark Fibre Africa and CIVH;
•Why he feels the decision by the competition authorities to block the acquisition by Vodacom of a 30% co-controlling stake in Maziv – a subsidiary of CIVH that houses Vumatel and DFA – was wrongheaded;
•The role New GX Capital plays today, as well as its investment philosophy;
•What led to the creation of the Airnegize Fund with RMB Ventures; and
•The role and future of black economic empowerment in South Africa.
Don’t miss a fascinating conversation! TechCentral
Yosheen Padayachee, group IT director at Tsebo Solutions Group, is our guest in this episode of TechCentral’s Meet the CIO.
Yosheen Padayachee was named as one of the top 100 most influential women in technology in 2024 and has been recognised among the Cyber 50 leaders in cybersecurity in Africa.
Padayachee, who serves as group IT director at workplace management solutions company Tsebo Solutions Group, is TechCentral’s guest in this episode of Meet the CIO.
Previously CIO for Africa at Momentum Metropolitan Holdings, Padayachee is pursuing a doctorate in technology innovation. She shares her story in this interview.
She unpacks:
•How her career pivoted from healthcare into IT and IT management;
•Her career journey so far, which has included roles in the banking sector at Nedbank and FNB, and important lessons she’s learnt along the way;
•The role of IT at Tsebo Solutions Group;
•The big technology projects she’s currently helping lead;
•Her insights on cybersecurity in modern organisations, and why security must be embedded at the foundation of all digital innovation;
•The impact of AI on the ability of companies to protect themselves from cyber adversaries; and
•Why gender diversity in the male-dominated technology industry is vital – and what needs to be done to encourage more young women to choose technology as a career.
Don’t miss this insightful conversation. TechCentral
The Better Connection. Everywhere You Go. Or simply just Y’ello. Brand identity matters, and MTN South Africa – one of South Africa’s most valued brands – is keenly aware of that fact.
Indeed, when a big consumer brand changes its brand positioning, it’s always a big deal – not only because of the work involved behind the scenes but also because it helps shift the narrative for that brand in small but important ways in the public consciousness.
For a handful of times in its storied, 31-year history, MTN has refreshed its brand image. And it’s just hit the “play” button on the latest overhaul.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology podcast, MTN South Africa GM for residential and post-paid services Bertus van der Vyver unpacks the company’s latest brand identity and why it made the decisions it did.
In the podcast, Van der Vyver chats about:
•Whether brand ends up influencing strategy, or the other way around;
•How the new brand positioning – the payoff line is Together We Make Moves – aligns with MTN’s ongoing efforts around customer experience, network innovation and its service offerings;
•How consumers will experience the brand refresh;
•How the changes tie into MTN’s social and business commitments; and
•How MTN’s new brand identity will allow the company to differentiate itself in the market, including in relation to its competitors.
Don’t miss this fascinating conversation about the value and importance of branding. TechCentral
A company with its headquarters in Pretoria has designed and built an advanced drone that can attain speeds of 250km/h, reach altitudes of up to 30 000ft and travel more than 4 000km before having to return to its base. The company, Milkor, is a South African defence equipment and cybersecurity specialist that was founded all the way back in 1981.
Its newly developed Milkor 380 System unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) – in essence, a giant drone – has a cruising altitude of 10 000ft, a wingspan of 18m and a maximum payload of 220kg.
The drone has a flight time of up to 35 hours and can be used for border surveillance, maritime surveillance, strategic reconnaissance and information gathering operations, among other things.
To talk about the UAV, Milkor communications director Daniel du Plessis sat down with Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show recently and shared more details about its capabilities.
Other than the Milkor 380, the interview also covers topics including:
Milkor’s founding in the 1980s, and how the company shifted focus in the democratic era – it got its start, and may still be best known for, manufacturing the world’s first six-shot 40mm grenade launcher, which is widely used around the world;
The company’s other products – for land, air and sea operations – as well as what’s involved in conducting advanced R&D and manufacturing in a market like South Africa;
The people who work for Milkor, and the sort of skills the company is looking for (and how it’s finding them);
The role of UAVs in modern warfare and defence operations; and
* Why Milkor has entered the cybersecurity space.
Don’t miss a fascinating interview! TechCentral
Discovery Bank CEO Hylton Kallner believes technology is fundamental to the company’s success.
Kallner, an actuary who joined Discovery in its early days as a medical insurance company and who has held various senior leadership roles over the years, tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the group’s decision to launch a bank when it did. He shares how the business is doing – spoiler: it’s trending well ahead of schedule – and what comes next.
He tells the TechCentral Show about:
•How Discovery Bank is doing financially and how it’s tracking against its business plan;
•Its client base – who they are and who the bank is targeting as its clientele (the answer may surprise you);
•Why Discovery launched a bank into what was already a competitive market and what it’s doing differently to its rivals to attract people to switch;
•The learnings from Discovery Health and Discovery Vitality, and how Discovery Bank has leveraged these in its products and services;
•Discovery Bank’s technology stack, why it chose the IT solutions it did, and why it built much of its banking solution in-house;
•What’s next from Discovery Bank in terms of solutions; and
•The bank’s plans with AI – and why it believes AI could be a gamechanger.
Lastly, Kallner, a prolific reader, shares two of his favourite non-fiction books with the TechCentral audience.
Don’t miss a great discussion! TechCentral
Shaun Maidment crossed South Africa in an electric car, a BMW i3, before there was a network of charging infrastructure along the national routes – and he has a heck of a story to tell about his adventure.
Charging infrastructure along South Africa’s national routes is now so commonplace that a cross-country trip in an EV is a daily occurrence.
But this was not always the case, and drivers in the early days of EVs in South Africa often had to rely on their wits and the kindness of strangers to keep their batteries charged on long-distance trips.
Maidment is one of South Africa’s original EV enthusiasts.
As the proud owner of what was once officially recognised as the highest-mileage BMW i3 in Africa – it now has 365 000km on the clock – he dared to travel across the length and breadth of South Africa long before charging infrastructure was commonplace.
Maidment tells the TechCentral Show’s Nkosinathi Ndlovu about:
•What inspired him in 2017 to take his first drive from Johannesburg to Cape Town in an EV;
•How he planned the trip, knowing that at the time there were not enough charging stations along the way;
•Some anecdotes from his travels, including the interesting people he met along the way;
•What his travels have taught him about the best way to drive an EV;
•How much mileage he is getting out of his i3 compared to when it was new; and
•His thoughts on the future of electric mobility in South Africa.
Maidment’s insights on EVs are based on years of personal experience. This episode of the show is not to be missed. TechCentral
Being a chief information security officer (CISO) in 2025 is a daunting role, but one that TechCentral’s guest in this episode of the Meet the CIO relishes.
Kerissa Varma, who was recently appointed as chief cybersecurity advisor in Africa for Microsoft, previously served as group CISO at Vodacom and before that as group CISO at Old Mutual. She understands what it takes to be a leading CISO.
She tells Meet the CIO about what’s involved in being a leader in enterprise cybersecurity, why she is passionate about developing female talent in the industry – she heads the South African chapter of Women in Cybersecurity – and what it takes to “make it” in what is very much still a male-dominated industry.
Varma chats about her experience as group CISO at Old Mutual and Vodacom. She also unpacks:
•How she became a leader in the enterprise security space;
•The role of a CISO in the modern enterprise – and why interpersonal skills are just as key as understanding technology;
•The top functions and priorities of today’s CISO;
•Strategies to fight the cybercrime scourge – including a look at how South African companies should be dealing with ransomware;
•Artificial intelligence and how it is transformation the infosec space – the impact, the threat and the opportunity;
•Quantum computing and the impact it could have in years to come;
•The gender imbalance in the infosec space and why it’s a concern to her;
•Skills development in cybersecurity in South Africa; and
•Her new role at Microsoft.
Don’t miss a fascinating conversation. And if you missed any of the previous episodes of Meet the CIO, you can find them here. TechCentral
Nithen Naidoo, founder and CEO of Snode Technologies, shares valuable insights on Snode and the cybersecurity space with TechCentral’s TCS+.
Snode evolved from a consultancy to a product-focused company almost by accident. The product was developed on the ground, which led to the philosophy of customer-led design, emphasising solutions that directly addresses the problems customers are experiencing.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, founder and CEO Nithen Naidoo unpacks the importance of stepping out of one’s comfort zone and not letting fear dictate decisions.
He believes South Africans are more than capable of building world-class technology and that the cyber landscape offers opportunities to innovate without requiring large investments.
He stresses the importance of adopting technology securely to propel businesses forward. Nithen has learnt the importance of collaboration and acknowledges that there are still many problems in the cybersecurity industry that are yet to be solved.
What Snode does today
Snode has grown to cover over eight million devices and protect systems and companies across six continents with a team of 60 staff. The company’s mission is to “solve cyber”. It has developed a platform that is highly automated and is moving towards autonomous security operations. This platform is designed to address the high costs of managing cybersecurity and the need for better automated solutions.
Snode’s technology uses metadata around packets instead of the data packets themselves for threat detection, which allows for privacy preservation. It leverages advances in machine learning and AI for innovation-driven security solutions. They also use mathematics as a fast and accurate method for threat detection. Furthermore, they use digital twin technology to simulate different types of scenarios, enabling predictive and prescriptive analytics for customers. This technology automatically classifies assets and understands their value to a business by using data from both internal and external sources.
The company’s solutions extend to both IT and OT (operational technology) environments, with a focus on the convergence of the two. Snode’s technology is protocol-independent and can eavesdrop on communications without needing proprietary information, which is beneficial in environments like industrial IoT and medical IoT.
Snode’s focus on continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) moves beyond traditional risk and vulnerability management. It looks at a company’s security through the lens of the asset, enriching available siloed data with the much-needed context to manage a company’s exposure holistically.
What the future holds
Snode aims to be a leader in the cybersecurity industry, acknowledging that the sector still has valuable problems to solve. Its vision is not just for South Africa, but for the whole of the African continent.
Naidoo says he wants to create a secure environment for African entrepreneurs to drive innovation. Snode already has a global reach, with a presence across six continents, and is working with the defence and critical national infrastructure sectors in a number of countries.
Snode plans to expand its approach to cybersecurity, using predictive capabilities for broader applications such as preventative maintenance in the OT environment and improving safety in various industries. It aims to change the traditional view of cyberthreats, moving towards a unified approach across threat management, vulnerability management and penetration testing.
Read more on techcentral.co.za.
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This episode is sponsored. TechCentral
The Competition Commission is girding itself for a fight with Big Tech companies like Google and Meta Platforms after publishing its provisional findings in its investigation into the impact that Big Tech has had on the South African news media sector.
To unpack the provisional report, which was published on Monday, Competition Commission senior analyst and technical lead Donnavan-John Linley joined the TechCentral Show to discuss the findings.
He chats about how the commission is attempting to assist local publishers deal with the rise of competing social media platforms owned by US tech giants and why the regulator is determined to intervene in the market to support the funding of journalism in South Africa in the digital age.
Linley tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about:
•Why the Competition Commission decided to initiate its probe into digital platforms and the impact these platforms are having on South Africa’s news media;
•The findings contained in the provisional report and why the commission reached the conclusions it did – including its recommendation that Google pay as much as R500-million/year in “compensation” over a three- to five-year period in an effort to level the playing field;
•The likely reaction from Big Tech to the commission’s proposals, and what might happen if they don’t agree to play ball;
•The risk of provoking a backlash from the Donald Trump administration – already Trump has accused the EU of using antitrust fines levied on US tech companies as a form of taxation and threatened retaliation in response;
•How the proposed compensation of the local news media might work, and who would be eligible to receive the funding from Google;
•The impact of artificial intelligence on the South African media industry and how the commission has dealt with this in its provisional report; and
•Whether the commission’s findings amount to regulatory overreach – are the proposals it has made really warranted, or is the media industry simply experiencing capitalism’s “creative destruction” that will ultimately drive innovation in news media?
Don’t miss a great interview! TechCentral
South Africa has a new player chasing the township fibre broadband market: Wire-Wire Networks has deployed fibre to 15 800 homes in Thembisa (previously Tembisa), a sprawling township in central Gauteng.
CEO JP Schmidtke joined the TechCentral Show earlier this week to share exclusive details about the company’s growth plans and to talk about the business opportunity for fibre companies in South Africa’s vast township economy.
Schmidtke said Wire-Wire Networks – like other industry players such as Vumatel, Fibertime and Frogfoot – believes townships present the next big expansion opportunity for fibre network operators, though the business model is rather different to the one used to deploy infrastructure in the suburbs.
Wire-Wire is offering uncapped fibre – delivered over a meshed Wi-Fi network from fibre endpoints in each home or dwelling, starting at R5 for an hour of uncapped internet access at 100Mbit/s (limited to a single device). Other price plans, which are all uncapped and offer 100Mbit/s, include:
•R9 for a one-day plan that connects one device
•R39 for a one-week plan that connects one device
•R119 for a one-month plan that connects one device
•R449 for a one-month plan that supports eight devices
•R1 120 for a one-month plan that supports 12 devices
Subscribers can connect anywhere in Thembisa where Wire-Wire has coverage and so are not confined to connecting to the network in the vicinity of their own homes.
There are no contracts or connection charges, and Wire-Wire provides a “free-to-use” Wi-Fi router and UPS (designed to keep the internet working even during load shedding and other power outages). The fibre is trenched, not delivered aerially, as it the case in many township deployments.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Schmidtke unpacks how Wire-Wire was formed, talks about its future plans and explains how it hopes to make low-cost fibre broadband profitable in township settings.
Wire-Wire’s leadership team consists of Schmidtke as well as fibre industry expert Hendrik Opperman, head of projects (external) Succeed Bvuma, head of technical David Radebe and head of projects (internal) Susan Hattingh.
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
South African logistics firm Bakers SA recently deployed the first electric trucks to its fleet of more than a thousand vehicles.
Working with Stellenbosch-based EV charging and software company Zimi Charge, Bakers’ deployment points a potential future in South Africa in which planet-warming trucks are replaced with electric alternatives.
Michael Maas, CEO of Zimi Charge, recently joined Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show to talk about the company’s solutions, its deployment for Bakers SA and its expansion plans.
In this episode of the show, Maas unpacks:
•The projects with Bakers SA, what Zimi Charge supplied and how it works in practice;
•The background to Zimi Charge and its focus on deploying both EV charging stations and building the software stack around them;
•The current state of EV charging infrastructure in South Africa and what more needs to be done to support the growing number of EVs on South African roads; and
•The market opportunity for Zimi Charge.
Don’t miss a great discussion! TechCentral
China’s DeepSeek rocked US technology stocks last month after the company appeared to have developed an artificial intelligence model akin to OpenAI’s most advanced ChatGPT models at a tiny fraction of the cost.
Stocks like Nvidia, Google and Microsoft cratered on the news as it raised serious questions about whether the tens of billions – if not hundreds of billions of dollars – that Big Tech is pouring into AI infrastructure makes sense and whether China is further ahead than many people had realised.
To unpack the potential implications of DeepSeek and the rise of Chinese AI models, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod spoke to South African AI expert and keynote speaker Dean Furman to unpack the subject is greater detail – including what it could mean in the South African context.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Furman discusses:
•Whether China – and DeepSeek specifically – just upended the economics of AI;
•Whether American Big Tech firms should be worried;
•DeepSeek’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to AI tools from the likes of Google, Meta Platforms and OpenAI;
•Chinese government censorship of DeepSeek’s results and whether this matters to users outside China;
•The significance of DeepSeek’s models being released using an open-source licence and what this means for the future development of AI; and
•How far the world is from AGI, or artificial general intelligence.
It’s a fascinating discussion – be sure not to miss it! TechCentral
Enviro Automotive has launched South Africa’s most affordable electric car yet, the Dayun S5 Mini SUV – and TechCentral has taken the vehicle for a test drive.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, we are joined by Environ Automotive executives Gideon Wolvaardt and Francois Malan to unpack the new Chinese EV and why they believe the S5 Mini is a gamechanger for South Africa’s motoring industry.
The four-seater compact SUV features a 31.7kWh ternary lithium battery, offering a range of about 300km and a top speed of 115km/h, making it ideal for urban commuting.
The vehicle has a modern interior equipped with a touchscreen infotainment system, multifunction steering wheel and a digital instrument panel. Convenience features include central locking, electric windows and air conditioning that can be operated remotely via an app, allowing drivers to start the vehicle before entering.
In this episode of TCS, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod takes the car for a test drive and shares his views on the build and ride quality – and much more! TechCentral
Adam Craker has strong views on what’s needed to turn around South Africa’s fortunes and fix its biggest city, Johannesburg, which has fallen into a state of disrepair.
The CEO of iqbusiness, a digital integrator in the Reunert stable formed recently though the merger of IQbusiness and +OneX, is our guest in this episode of the TechCentral Show.
Craker – whose career has seen him working for the likes of Accenture, Merchants, Dimension Data and Super Group – tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about his plans for iqbusiness post-merger, how it fits in with Reunert’s overall growth plans and why the transaction made sense.
He also unpacks:
•His take on the government of national unity and why he remains bullish about South Africa’s prospects;
•The news that government is considering listing some of South Africa’s state-owned enterprises on the JSE;
•His biggest concerns about the country’s future; and
•What needs to be done to save Joburg – and the role of the Jozi My Jozi initiative.
Don’t miss a great conversation! TechCentral
Microsoft Azure SQL is a fully managed and scalable cloud database service – and its myriad benefits mean your company should be considering it if it isn’t already using it.
To unpack this in more detail, Preegan Chetty, Microsoft Azure product manager at First Distribution, and Silicon Overdrive Microsoft business executive Jody Roberts join TechCentral’s business technology show TCS+.
In the episode, they unpack:
•The relationship between First Distribution and Silicon Overdrive;
•Silicon Overdrive’s market focus;
•What Azure SQL is and how it’s helping companies with their digital transformation initiatives;
•Why many South African businesses run SQL Server databases, usually on-premises, and what the advantages are of moving these databases into the Microsoft Azure cloud;
•The cost advantages of shifting, and what’s involved in doing so;
•The security considerations of shifting from on-premises SQL Server to Azure SQL;
•The features that make Azure SQL particularly secure;
•Use cases of businesses leveraging Azure SQL; and
•Azure SQL Database vs SQL Managed Instance vs SQL Service on Azure virtual machines – the differences between these options, and why businesses should choose one over another.
Don’t miss the discussion.
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TCS+ episodes are sponsored. TechCentral
In the second episode of this series about migrating to Microsoft Azure SQL, the focus turns to what’s involved in moving from SQL Server to Azure SQL, and First Distribution’s Preegan Chetty returns to unpack the key priority of securing databases in the cloud.
If you missed episode 1 in the series, you can find it here – or dive straight into this interview.
Preegan Chetty, who is Microsoft Azure product manager at First Distribution, unpacks:
•What makes Azure SQL a secure choice for companies today, including features such as data encryption (when data is at rest or in transit), threat detection and firewall protection;
•Why companies shouldn’t simply assume that the cloud is secure because it’s being managed by a hyperscale cloud services provider;
•Azure SQL’s performance, and the optimisations that can be done to make the system fly; and
•The role of AI in cloud database management.
Don’t miss any of the episodes in this insightful series. TechCentral
Is your company thinking about modernising its IT infrastructure? Is it planning to migrate from an on-premises Microsoft SQL Server database to the cloud-based Azure SQL solution? Then this podcast is for you.
In this two-part series, we delve into greater detail on what’s involved in a cloud database migration.
First Distribution’s Microsoft Azure product manager Preegan Chetty is our guest in the studio for this episode. He unpacks:
•The risks and opportunities involved in the migration;
•What companies need to be aware of before they even embark on a migration to Azure SQL;
•How Microsoft helps companies with their migration projects; and
•The top motivating factors driving companies to migrate away from an on-premises SQL Server solution to Azure SQL.
Don’t miss this informative discussion – and be sure to catch episode 2 in this series with First Distribution. TechCentral
Matric Live is a study tool to help students in grades 10-12 supplement their in-class learning with additional exercises – and even get exam practice via a digital platform. And it recently won the FNB App of the Year award amid stiff competition from the likes of Checkers Sixty60 and TFG’s Bash.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Matric Live CEO Kagisho Masae and chief technology officer Lesego Finger tell TechCentral’s Nathi Ndlovu about their journey as a start-up and the growth Matric Live has gone through in the last few years.
They delve into:
•The inspiration behind the Matric Live app and the problem it seeks to solve for students;
•The journey from app idea to full-fledged live system and the challenges faced along the way;
•How the application is being monetised while keeping access to the platform free for its users;
•The impact Matric Live has had on South African students;
•Some success stories about students who have used the app;
•Upcoming features to look forward to on the application;
•The vision Masae and Finger have for the future of their business; and
•The significance of winning the App of the Year award.
Masae and Finger tell an inspiring story of battling against the odds and succeeding at solving one of the most foundational problems confronting South African society: the dissemination of quality education to all corners of the country. Don’t miss a great conversation! TechCentral
The operating environment in South Africa for ride-hailing services like Bolt is fraught with complexity, while the country’s crime problem only contributes to the challenge of getting passengers safely from A to B.
This complexity is compounded by the nuances of operating in different areas. Municipal districts have different permitting requirements, while competitive elements from other transport sector players, like taxi associations, presents further challenges.
Fulfilling a ride request in the Cape Flats at 11pm is a different proposition to one in Sandton at 2pm.
Simo Kalajdzic, senior operations manager at Bolt South Africa, tells TechCentral’s business technology show, TCS+, about how Bolt is approaching these challenges. He delves into:
•The overall problem that Bolt is trying to solve for South Africans;
•Bolt’s strategic approach to safety on the platform;
•The £100-million investment into safety Bolt has pledged at a global level;
•The technological solutions baked into the Bolt app for both drivers and passengers;
•The industry-wide collaborations Bolt has undertaken to address safety from an ecosystem perspective;
•How drivers and riders are empowered to be safe on the platform;
•Feedback from a recent stakeholder engagement meeting held in Cape Town; and
•Bolt’s long-term vision for safety in the South African context.
This episode is not to be missed! TechCentral
Well-known South African technology entrepreneur Stafford Masie is one of the key backers behind an audacious bid to buy a stake of up to 40% in the South African Rugby Union (Saru)-owned entity that owns the commercial rights to the Springboks brand.
Masie, who chairs JSE-listed Altvest Capital – a key player in the consortium making the bid – joins the TechCentral Show with Altvest CEO Warren Wheatley to unpack the plan and what spurred it, and to explain why tech is central to the bid.
The bid comes after member unions of SA Rugby last week rejected a plan to sell a 20% in the commercial rightsholder to US-based Ackerley Sports Group for US$75-million. Ackerley has until the end of the year to submit a revised offer, but Wheatley and Masie told TechCentral that they do not expect a deal with the American firm will succeed.
The South African consortium is made up of Altvest as well as EasyEquities, RainFin and 27four Investment Managers.
In a statement, the consortium explained that if its bid is successful, it will list the special purpose vehicle that has been created to do the deal on the JSE and allow investors to buy shares.
This is not dissimilar to Altvest’s business model, which sees it taking stakes in companies on behalf of public shareholders who participate in the economic benefits thereof.
“Worth thinking about for the tech community is that our platform allows for ‘crowdfunding’ in a regulated environment that allows for participation in a funding round to anybody with disposable income – from first-time users or customers, all the way through to regulated institutions and pension funds,” Wheatley explained.
In this episode of TCS, Masie and Wheatley unpack:
•The background to their consortium’s Springboks bid – and why the consortium members came together;
•How the bidders will work with SA Rugby to commercialise the rights, assuming their bid is successful;
•How the deal could affect broadcast partners; and
•Why they believe the deal could be used as a platform for technology innovation in South Africa.
It’s an interesting discussion – don’t miss it! TechCentral
The South African Reserve Bank is working with its peers in the Southern African region to drive financial inclusion by digitising cash and making instant payments across borders an everyday reality.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), Tim Masela, head of the National Payments System department at the Reserve Bank – he has been with the Bank for the past 30 years – tells TechCentral’s Nathi Ndlovu about the efforts it is making to create a “cash smart” society not only in Southern Africa but across the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) region.
Masela unpacks:
•Why the introduction of non-bank fintechs into the national and regional clearance and settlements systems is important;
•The importance of designing “fit for purpose” regulations that allow fintech to remain nimble and innovative;
•A detailed explanation of how the payments and settlements system worked historically, including how it has evolved in the digital era;
•The efforts the Reserve Bank and its regional counterparts are undertaking to standardise financial legislation and regulation across Sadc;
-The importance of the Transactions Cleared on an Immediate Basis (TCIB) platform, which facilitates PayShap-style instant payments across borders;
-The challenges that currency conversion poses in facilitating instant payments across borders;
-Findings from the National Payments Study conducted by the Reserve Bank and released in September;
-What a “cash light” and “cash smart” society are and why the Reserve Bank believes this is desirable; and
-Where the Reserve Bank stands on crypto assets and the road to their incorporation into South Africa’s National Payments System.
Do not miss this insightful and informative episode. TechCentral
Companies moving to the cloud – and those already there – need to be aware of the Toxic Cloud Trilogy, three pitfalls in cloud computing that must be avoided.
Bernard Montel, technical director at exposure management company Tenable for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, recently unpacked this for TechCentral’s audience in an episode of TCS+ (watch or listen to the interview below).
Montel unpacked what the three risk factors are that make up the Toxic Cloud Trilogy – critical vulnerabilities, excessive permissions and public exposure – and how to deal with each of them effectively.
Tenable recently published its 2024 Tenable Cloud Risk Report, which examines findings by the Tenable Cloud Research team based on telemetry from millions of cloud resources across multiple public cloud repositories.
In this episode of TCS+, Montel discusses:
•Tenable, its history and its focus areas in the information security industry;
•Why companies should take the Toxic Cloud Trilogy seriously, and how it amplifies risk for organisations;
•The key findings in Tenable’s Cloud Risk Report and what they mean in practice, including addressing the Toxic Cloud Trilogy; and
•How Tenable Cloud Security can help companies overcome the Toxic Cloud Trilogy.
If you’re involved in protecting your organisation’s data and assets in the cloud, don’t miss this important discussion. TechCentral
Trace Network Operations, founded in 2016, provides bespoke network solutions in network management and network monitoring.
Company founder Darryl Theron saw a gap in the market for a company that provides leading solutions in this space, stemming from his many years of experience in the pan-African infrastructure market.
This episode of TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology podcast, hosted by Jaydev Chiba, delves into how Trace Network Operations supports its customers in the areas of network management and network monitoring as a service (NMaaS) with Theron and his colleague, Gert van Deventer.
The company’s solutions are built around a product called StableNet, a carrier-grade network management and monitoring system that is built from the ground up. Trace Network Operations also uses other technologies, including the Red Hat Ansible automation platform, Cubro, Sophos, NetWitness and FNT.
The company’s solutions are designed to help businesses solve problems such as:
•Lack of visibility into network activity: Many businesses lack the tools and expertise to monitor their networks effectively. This can lead to problems such as security breaches, performance issues and outages.
•Difficulty in troubleshooting problems: When problems do occur, it can be difficult to identify the root cause and resolve them quickly.
•Lack of automation: Many network management tasks are still performed manually, which is time-consuming and prone to errors.
Trace Network Operations addresses these issues by providing a comprehensive suite of NMaaS solutions that includes:
•Network monitoring: StableNet provides real-time visibility into network activity, allowing businesses to identify and resolve problems quickly.
•Network management: The company’s solutions help businesses to automate many network management tasks, such as configuration management, change management and fault management.
•Security monitoring: It integrates solutions such as NetWitness and Cobra to provide comprehensive security monitoring and management.
Trace Network Operations offers its solutions on a flexible basis, allowing businesses to tailor the level of service that best meets their needs.
The interview also includes a few case studies of how Trace Network Operations’ solutions have been used to provide value and benefits for companies. TechCentral
Information technology service management (ITSM) is more than another buzzword. It’s a concept that helps organisations design and deliver IT services to customers and, when well executed, it can have a huge impact on productivity as well as customer and employee experience.
But too often companies don’t do it right, leading to headaches and lost productivity.
To unpack the topic, Muggie van Staden, MD at open-source enterprise software specialist Obsidian Systems, joins TechCentral’s TCS+ to discuss the latest trends in ITSM and what they mean for South African organisations.
Van Staden unpacks:
•The concept of ITSM and what it involves;
•How successful companies utilise ITSM to better manage customer experience, free up IT resources, align IT with business goals, enhance security and risk mitigation, foster scalable growth, and accelerate digital transformation;
•The emerging trends in ITSM that are shaping how organisations manage their IT services and IT infrastructure;
•The role of artificial intelligence and automation in ITSM;
•The shift to Agile and DevOps integration; and
•Where Obsidian fits into the ITSM picture.
Don’t miss a fascinating conversation with a leader in the ITSM space in South Africa. TechCentral
Datafree Technologies, the company behind popular zero-rated messaging tool MoyaApp, has an ambitious plan to build a R1-billion/year business by tapping to the APN market provided by the mobile operators.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), Datafree chief commercial officer Kruben Pillay tells Duncan McLeod about the company’s plan to build a software-as-a-service-based APN – or “access point name” – to sell to businesses. An APN is a gateway that allows a mobile device to connect to the network and the internet.
Datafree describes itself as a specialist in “mobile data optimisation” that “identified the opportunity to empower inclusive mobile connection by removing the data cost barrier to engage mobile audiences”.
To do this, it uses reverse-billing technology for data, not dissimilar to the way toll-free numbers work for phone calls.
Although many people use or are at least aware of MoyaApp, much less is known about Datafree. In this episode of TCS, Pillay tells McLeod more about the business. He also unpacks:
•His history in the telecommunications industry, including his time at Vodacom and Telkom;
•How MoyaApp is doing;
•Datafree’s R1-billion/year APN opportunity; and
•How APNs work, why companies use them (and why they sometimes run into issues) and Datafree’s APN services for business.
Don’t miss the interview! TechCentral
Veeam is helping organisations in South Africa and the rest of the African continent safeguard their most valuable asset: their data.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, four senior executives from Veeam unpack the latest trends in data resilience and protection, and explore how African organisations can better protect themselves against a data disaster.
To unpack this in detail, TCS+ is joined in this two-parter episode by Veeam’s:
•Mena Migally, regional vice president, Europe, the Middle East and Africa;
•Brendan Widlake, regional director and country manager, Africa;
•Ian Engelbrecht, head of technical sales, Africa; and
•Lisa Strydom, senior manager for channel and alliances, Africa.
Topics covered in the discussion include:
•The unique challenges that businesses in Africa face when it comes to securing and managing their data;
•The role of data resilience in helping African businesses maintain continuous availability of their data in the face of growing cyberthreats.
•Securing on-premises and cloud-based environments and the challenges involved in doing so;
•How Veeam works with local partners to ensure African businesses optimise their data protection strategies and build resilience;
•How Veeam helps companies deal with ransomware attacks, both before and after they happen; and
•The emerging trends and innovations in data resilience and protection.
For more information on Veeam’s portfolio of data resilience solutions, including backup, recovery, cloud data management and disaster recovery, visit Veeam’s data resilience portfolio. TechCentral
Eswatini is on a mission to roll out high-speed fibre broadband infrastructure for its citizens.
According to Themba Khumalo, MD of The Eswatini Posts & Telecommunications Corporation (EPTC), the landlocked territory will draw lessons from leaders in national fibre roll-out in other markets as it deploys infrastructure to the population.
In this episode of TCS+, filmed on-site in Cape Town during Africa Tech Week, Khumalo delves into:
•The role of EPTC Eswatini;
•Features unique to Eswatini that make the challenge of a national fibre roll-out a little easier than it might be in other territories;
•EPTC’s national fibre strategy;
•How the population will benefit from the speed upgrades that a fibre roll-out will enable;
•The proposed timelines for the competition of the national fibre roll-out; and
•The role government will play in accelerating infrastructure roll-out.
Don’t miss the conversation. TechCentral
In the final episode of a three-part interview series with TechCentral’s TCS+, Digicloud Africa executives unpack what Google Cloud’s solutions mean for end-user organisations in Africa.
Digicloud Africa is Google Cloud’s enablement partner on the continent, and the company’s CEO, Gregory MacLennan, and head of technical operations Louis van Schalkwyk return to the show to chat about what Google Cloud software can do for businesses that deploy it.
In episode 1 of this series, we had a look at Digicloud, what it does, and its relationship with Google. In episode 2, we looked at the company’s reseller partner model, what it involves and how it works with its reseller partners. (LINKS TO SHOWS TO BE INSERTED WHEN AVAILABLE.)
In the final episode, MacLennan and Van Schalkwyk unpack:
•The Google Cloud advantage relative to other cloud and enterprise software solutions;
•How companies can use Google Cloud to innovate and grow their businesses;
•The importance of using open IT infrastructure like Google’s – and what this means for collaboration and information security;
•What Google Cloud offers in specific sectors, including education;
•Examples of African enterprises and government agencies doing interesting things with Google Cloud technology;
•How Digicloud Africa works with resellers to offer Google Cloud solutions to companies, educational institutions and government – and how Digicloud supports those resellers in client engagements and deployments; and
•Becoming a Google Cloud reseller through Digicloud and what’s involved.
Don’t miss insightful interview, and the others in this series! TechCentral
Pinnacle, one of South Africa’s leading technology distributors, is going all-in on AI.
The company, which represents some of the leading brands in the artificial intelligence space, is working closely with its vendors and channel partners to help local companies embrace the potential of the technology and expand employee productivity.
Jacques Visage, GM for AI and Services at Pinnacle, is the man leading this charge, and he’s TechCentral’s guest in this episode of TCS+.
He unpacks why Pinnacle sees AI as a strategic imperative and how it is positioning itself as an AI leader in the distribution space.
In the discussion, Visagie chats about:
•Pinnacle’s go-to-market strategy around AI and how it is working with its channel partners to provide AI solutions to businesses;
•The company’s key partners and technology providers;
•How conversations around AI in corporate South Africa have changed since the launch two years ago of OpenAI’s ChatGPT;
•What South African companies are doing with AI – and what they want to do with it in future; and
•The top-of-mind issues around AI in the C-suite and the biggest use cases we’re seeing so far in corporate South Africa.
Don’t miss this important and insightful conversation! TechCentral
José Soares, director of IT at The Capital Hotels, Apartments and Resorts, fell in love with computers when his dad brought home a Sinclair ZX81.
Through a series of upgrades – from the Commodore 64 to early Apple machines and eventually his first PC – Soares developed a passion for gaming and technology.
Meet the CIO is presented by Wipro
That passion led him to co-found a mobile gaming company and eventually to pursue a career in IT management.
Our guest in the latest episode of Meet the CIO, Soares tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the journey that led him to The Capital Hotels group.
Soares also discusses:
•The assets owned by the group and why it’s focus is a little different to other companies in the hospitality industry;
•What the group’s IT stack looks like, and the big projects Soares is leading;
•How the internet and modern technology have transformed the hospitality industry;
•His strategic priorities as head of IT;
•The role of artificial intelligence in the hospitality industry, and how The Capital Hotel is approaching AI;
•The qualities that make for a good CIO; and
•The importance of developing the next generation of IT talent.
Don’t miss a great conversation! TechCentral
The digitisation of money is helping drive financial inclusion and improve access to complex financial services in South Africa and the rest of the African continent.
In this episode of TCS+, Hannes Wessels, GM for South Africa at Binance, explains the role cryptocurrencies are playing in the digitisation of cash as well as the potential that blockchain technology offers in enhancing the security of digital transactions.
In this episode, Wessels delves into:
•The trends, challenges and opportunities shaping the future of digital banking in South Africa;
•How Binance is capitalising on the growth of mobile banking and other advancements in financial technology;
•Examples of how blockchain technology can enhance transaction security;
•How decentralised finance can make financial services accessible to everyone in Africa; and
•How Binance is contributing to the digital cash revolution.
Don’t miss this exciting episode of TCS+. TechCentral
In the second part of a three-part interview series with TechCentral’s TCS+, Digicloud Africa executives unpack how African ICT companies can become reseller partners for Google Cloud in Africa.
Digicloud is Google Cloud’s chosen enablement partner for Africa and works closely with the US technology giant to deliver its services across the continent – through a network of resellers.
In this episode of TCS+, Digicloud Africa CEO Gregory MacLennan and head of technical operations Louis van Schalkwyk unpack what’s involved in becoming a reseller partner to Digicloud Africa and Google Cloud.
The two men chat about:
•Digicloud Africa’s role as the African enablement partner for Google Cloud;
•Google Cloud’s go-to-market strategy in Africa and how it works through Digicloud Africa to support a network of resellers across the continent;
•How the relationship between Google Cloud, Digicloud and its resellers partners operate in the context of serving end-user customers;
•How IT companies can sign up to become Google Cloud resellers through Digicloud – the requirements and what’s involved;
•How Digicloud supports specialisation by its reseller partners; and
•The challenge of managing a network of resellers across a continent as vast as Africa.
Don’t miss the interview, or the others in this insightful series with Digicloud Africa. TechCentral
Digicloud Africa has a big role to play in the African ICT ecosystem as Google Cloud’s enablement partner on the continent.
Two of Digicloud’s top executives recently sat down for an interview with TechCentral’s TCS+ to unpack the business, its relationship with Google, and how it serves its reseller partners and their clients in adopting Google Cloud services.
Gregory MacLennan, Digicloud’s CEO, and Louis van Schalkwyk, the company’s head of technical operations, tell TechCentral about the business and why Google Cloud services are seeing strong demand across Africa.
In this first of a succinct three-part series with Digicloud, MacLennan and Van Schalkwyk discuss:
•The history of Digicloud and how it became Google Cloud’s enablement partner for Africa;
•How the partnership with Google Cloud works, and why Google chooses to work through reseller partners in smaller markets like those in Africa;
•The solutions on offer from Google via Digicloud; and
•How companies can become Google Cloud resellers through Digicloud Africa – and why the company is encouraging more entities to sign up and go through the process of accreditation (and what’s involved).
Don’t miss the interview! TechCentral
In this episode of TCS+, TechCentral speaks with Jason Oehley and Andre den Hond, regional sales manager and senior sales engineer, respectively, at Arctic Wolf, a company specialising in cybersecurity operations. They discuss the benefits of partnering with a cybersecurity provider versus building an in-house security operations centre (SOC).
The conversation begins by focusing on the critical role of security operations in ensuring business continuity. Every organisation requires a certain level of security, which can vary based on what employees are doing and what the organisation is focused on. Security operations are about finding the right balance between the actual security level and the required level – enough to be protected but without overspending.
The speakers then explore the challenges of building an in-house SOC. The biggest challenges they see with customers trying to build a SOC are skills shortages, identifying and integrating the right security tools, and a lack of comprehensive visibility across the organisation's attack surface. They find that organisations often struggle to find the right skills and tools, and even if they do, it can be difficult to retain skilled security professionals. Customers also experience alert fatigue from too many alerts from their security tools.
Partnering with a provider like Arctic Wolf can help address these challenges. Arctic Wolf will work and integrate with the customer's existing security tools and team, providing 24/7 monitoring and threat detection. This removes the burden of building and managing an SOC from the customer, allowing them to focus on business risk and strategic security management.
Arctic Wolf’s “concierge delivery model” helps customers continuously improve their security posture through a collaborative, partnership approach. This includes vulnerability management, security awareness training and incident response capabilities. This approach contrasts with a product-centric approach, which the speakers argue is not enough in today’s threat landscape.
The speakers conclude by discussing future trends in cybersecurity. They predict a consolidation in the cybersecurity market, with smaller companies being absorbed by larger ones. They also believe that the threat landscape will become more complex as attackers leverage AI and other advanced techniques. They stress the importance of a proactive and comprehensive approach to security, and the value of partnering with a security provider that can help organisations stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape.
Don’t miss this informative and important discussion! TechCentral
The world of telephony might not be particularly sexy, but it is an industry that has changed fundamentally in the past 20 years.
And David Meintjes and Rob Lith of Telviva, a South African company specialising in cloud-based unified communications solutions for businesses, has been at the forefront of the technology changes that have swept through the industry in that time.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, the pair tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the journey from the early days of the business – when it was known as Connection Telecom – to the cloud-based telephony specialist it is today, as Telviva.
In the interview, Meintjes and Lith chat about:
•The evolution of Connection Telecom, its original mission, and how the business evolved into the unified communications as a service (UCaaS) provider it is today;
•How the telephony market in South Africa has changed beyond recognition over the past 20 years; and
•Telviva’s international expansion plans and its strategy around acquisitions.
There’s plenty more in this interview with two ICT industry legends – don’t miss it. TechCentral
South Africa’s rooftop solar installation industry has a bright future and is on track for its second-best year on record, despite the suspension of load shedding in March.
That’s according to Andrew Middleton, co-founder and CEO of GoSolr, one of South Africa’s largest rooftop solar installation companies, who spoke to TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) earlier this week.
According to Middleton, citing figures from Eskom, 749MW of rooftop solar capacity has been installed in South Africa this year, taking the total to 5.9GW. Some 162MW of new rooftop solar was added in the third quarter, down 267MW from the same three months in 2023, when load shedding was frequently at stage 4 or higher.
The figures are contained in the latest quarterly report published by GoSolr on the state of the industry.
In his interview with TCS, Middleton unpacks:
• The impact of the suspension of load shedding on the rooftop solar industry;
• What’s driving consumers to consider solar at home today;
• The impact of the adoption of electric vehicles on the demand for home solar – and what sort of solar installation consumers who own or are thinking of buying an EV need to consider;
• The state of play in the municipalities around feed-in tariff structures – an update on Cape Town, Johannesburg, Tshwane, Nelson Mandela Bay and more;
• The future role of embedded generation systems in communities – the way forward and the hurdles that might be encountered; and
• Why government was wrong to withdraw the tax rebate on solar panels and to impose higher taxes on their importation.
Don’t miss this insightful conversation about the state of South Africa’s rooftop solar industry. TechCentral
Nasdaq-listed Equinix has completed construction of the first phase of a new data centre in Johannesburg, part of a R7.5-billion commitment to building cloud infrastructure in South Africa and the rest of the continent over the next five years.
The company’s South African MD, Sandile Dube – a former country manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and a former executive at Dimension Data (now NTT Data) – tells TechCentral Show host Duncan McLeod about the new Johannesburg data centre, which is located in Isando on the East Rand, and what type of clients it’s hoping to attract.
In the interview, Dube chats about:
•Equinix’s African investment plans and where it intends to build data centre facilities and why;
•The Isando data centre and what it offers;
•The Equinix company and its investment focus – including its investments in West Africa;
•Whether there is an overbuild of data centres taking place in South Africa. Can market demand sustain the level of investment taking place?; and
•How Equinix differentiates itself in an increasingly crowded market.
Don’t miss a great interview! TechCentral
Lincoln Mali has been at the helm of Lesaka Technologies Southern Africa, a fintech with a sizeable footprint in Southern Africa’s informal markets, since 2021.
One of his main tasks has been to turn the company’s finances around by reigning in business units that were haemorrhaging cash in the past. Lesaka’s latest set of financial results suggests it’s making progress.
In this episode of TechCentral Show, Mali speaks to TechCentral’s Nathi Ndlovu about:
•Lesaka’s latest financial results, breaking down each of the group's key business units;
•The resilience of Lesaka’s loans business;
•The importance of data analytics in driving Lesaka’s merchant lending business;
•The impact of the interest rate cycle on business;
•How the digitisation of cash is progressing in the informal market;
•Lesaka’s acquisition strategy, including the recent blockbuster purchase of Adumo; and
•The rationale behind Lesaka’s primary listing on the Nasdaq in the US (it has a secondary listing on the JSE).
Don’t miss this fast-paced episode of the TechCentral Show. TechCentral
Networking equipment wholesaler Switchcom Distribution has partnered with Huawei Technologies to bring new offerings to the South African market and elsewhere in Africa.
In this episode of TCS+, Lynton Brits, national sales manager at Switchcom, and Tanki Lebatla, account manager at Huawei, tell TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology show about the partnership and what it means for the market.
In the show, Brits and Lebatla delve into:
•The networking and backup power solutions offered by Switchcom through its partnership with Huawei;
•The training and implementation support Huawei provides to Switchcom and what that means for Switchcom’s reseller clients;
•How the two companies are shoring up the supply chain to ensure that customers have enough stock;
•The guarantees Huawei and Switchcom offer clients on the hardware, as well as the process for swap-outs and replacements; and
•The hardware innovations and capabilities of Huawei’s networking and backup power products.
This interview is not to be missed, especially for builders of networks or owners of large-scale infrastructure that cannot afford to be without power. TechCentral
In this episode of TCS+, TechCentral speaks to CYBER1 Solutions executives Jayson O’Reilly, the company’s MD, and Akeel Sayed, head of its managed services division, about the benefits and challenges of using a managed security service provider (MSSP).
The conversation starts by discussing the growing complexity of cybersecurity and the financial motivations driving cybercriminals. With the underground economy expanding, MSSPs must constantly adapt to new attack methods. Early adopters of cutting-edge technology may take on higher risks, but they also build knowledge that benefits future clients, reducing their exposure to emerging threats.
The proliferation of security operations centres in South Africa, now numbering more than 30, is driven by skill shortages and the need for assurance. Many organisations still lack visibility into their network environments, which the experts identify as a key issue. Understanding what’s connected to a network and which applications are in use is essential but often overlooked.
MSSPs also help clients manage budget constraints and meet compliance requirements while keeping pace with fast-moving technological change. South Africa is seen as a testing ground for cybercriminals targeting the broader African market. Clients now prefer flexible, short-term investments over long-term contracts due to the evolving threat landscape. The experts stress the importance of MSSPs staying relevant by challenging vendors and adapting their offerings to new threats like artificial intelligence.
A major concern is the lack of governance in many industries, especially those with strict compliance needs. Organisations are realising the need to think like attackers and continuously evolve their defences. AI is highlighted as a significant disruptor, with MSSPs now focused on securing AI algorithms and leveraging AI to enhance security operations.
The podcast discussion compares MSSPs with in-house security teams, noting that MSSPs offer greater agility and a broader range of expertise. In-house teams often face resource constraints and difficulty staying up to date with new technologies. MSSPs, on the other hand, focus on governance and outcomes, allowing businesses to prioritise other critical needs.
The experts underscore the need for collaboration across the cybersecurity industry. MSSPs can share anonymised insights across clients, helping create a unified defence against attackers. Ultimately, MSSPs provide value by evolving their offerings, focusing on outcomes and using collective experience to keep clients secure in an ever-changing threat landscape.
Don’t miss a great discussion. TechCentral
Communications minister Solly Malatsi, a DA MP and the first non-ANC politician to hold the key technology portfolio in the democratic era, has been in the job for three months – sufficient time to get a broad handle on the big issues.
In this first interview with the TechCentral Show, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod asks Malatsi a range of questions about the sector, including his views on how he plans to address some of the more intractable problems in his inbox.
The interview, which was recorded on Friday, 4 October – shortly before he announced he was issuing a policy direction to communications regulator Icasa that could see a big change to empowerment rules governing licensing in the sector – covers a wide range of topics, from Elon Musk’s Starlink to the ongoing feud between the SABC and Sentech.
Other topics covered in the interview include:
•The minister’s engagements with Starlink and the recent meeting in New York between Musk and President Cyril Ramaphosa;
•His views on black economic empowerment and why his top priority is reducing the cost of data and ensuring more South Africans can connect affordably to the internet and online services;
•His plan for private sector participation in the Post Office, and whether the company is really worth saving;
•The war between the SABC and Sentech, and how it can be resolved;
•Future funding models for the SABC and the future of TV licences in South Africa;
•The problems at the State IT Agency, and what the focus should be of government’s central IT procurement and services provider;
•The planned merger of Sentech and Broadband Infraco and why he believes it needs to happen;
•Government’s 40.5% stake in Telkom and what should happen to it;
•The road to digital migration and whether there is still a need for terrestrial television in 2024;
•2G and 3G switch-off in South Africa and whether this should be mandated by the government; and
•The legislative programme for the department of communications & digital technologies.
Don’t miss the interview! TechCentral
Hypa Fibre is a fibre internet service provider focused on underserved markets in South Africa’s townships.
John Githinji, national head of sales at Hypa, which is a subsidiary of telecommunications provider Vox, tells TechCentral’s business technology show TCS+ that the company is using its presence in underserved markets to plug gaps beyond internet services.
In this episode of TCS+, Githinji delves into:
•What Hypa is and its relationship with Vox;
•The death and disability benefit Hypa offers free of charge to its paying customers;
•Why Hypa’s customers take advantage of its death benefits instead of opting for a traditional insurance company;
•Who qualifies for Hypa’s death and disability benefit; and
•The costs associated with the offering.
This episode of TCS+ is not to be missed! TechCentral
At more than R23-billion/year, Standard Bank Group has the biggest IT budget of any company in South Africa – and quite possibly in the whole of Africa.
The man charged with ensuring the continent’s largest financial services provider is spending that money optimally is group CIO Jörg Fischer, who is TechCentral’s guest in this episode of Meet the CIO, the publication’s monthly interview series presented by Wipro, where, instead of focusing on the vendors of technology, we interview the end users of IT – banks, retailers, manufacturers and more – about how they’re using modern technology to grow their businesses and drive their strategic agendas.
Meet the CIO is presented by Wipro
In this episode of Meet the CIO, Fischer chats about the technology function at Standard Bank Group, the role of a CIO in the financial services industry, the big strategic IT projects which the bank is involved with – and much, much more.
Among other topics, Fischer discusses:
•The career trajectory that resulted in him becoming a top IT leader;
•Why Standard Bank Group spends as much as it does on IT, and where that spending is directed;
•How IT aligns with the group’s strategic focus areas;
•The decision to migrate to SAP’s core banking solution, what was involved, the lessons learned and how the platform is working for the bank in 2024;
•What Standard Bank’s technology stack looks like, and its investment in the cloud;
•What makes a good CIO in 2024, including the skills that are important in the role;
•How Standard Bank is approaching AI – and what it can actually achieve for the bank and its clients;
•How technology is changing the banking industry;
•Standard Bank’s approach to cybersecurity; and
•How Standard Bank attracts and retains IT talent.
Don’t miss a fascinating conversation that provides great insight into how IT has become mission critical in modern banking. TechCentral
Warwick Ward-Cox, chief technical officer at Network Platforms – a wholesale provider specialising in supporting internet service providers and IT managed service providers – is deeply immersed in the plumbing of the South African technology space, currently supporting over a 100 ISPs and MSPs.
Ward-Cox, who has immersed himself in the world of technology for the past 30 years, is the guest in this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology show, in which he chats about the work that Network Platforms does and how the internet landscape in South Africa has been transformed over the past 10 years.
In this episode, he discusses:
•Network Platforms, what it does and how and why it’s focus has shifted over time;
•What internet infrastructure in South Africa looks like in 2024, including national long-distance fibre and subsea cables;
•Why some terrestrial fibre routes in South Africa are “challenging”, and why submarine cables along the coastline alleviate the problem;
•Why IP transit to ISPs is a critical service;
•Internet peering in South Africa, how it works and why it’s important;
•The outlook for peering; and
•Why ISPs and managed service providers should choose Network Platforms
This is a great conversation about the development and state of the internet in South Africa, what it looks like and where it may be going. Don’t miss it! TechCentral
Donald Valoyi saw the potential market for on-demand grocery deliver in South Africa, and his company Zulzi was a pioneer in the space.
It even went on to help Shoprite Holdings launched the Checkers Sixty60 app.
Zulzi was founded in 2013 as an “aggregator” of various shopping outlets to help consolidate the online shopping for customers.
Today the company provides support to Sixty60 and continues to operate as a separate entity through seven of its own “dark stores”, or warehouses.
Zulzi founder Valoyi joins the TechCentral Show to chat about the company's journey, which began with his exit from corporate South Africa into entrepreneurship.
He shares his views on the innovations reshaping the e-commerce sector and how South African businesses should equip themselves to handle competition from international players.
Valoyi also chats about:
•His entrepreneurial ambitions and why he chose e-commerce as his focus;
•The early days of Zulzi, and how he built the business;
•How Zulzi’s relationship with Shoprite and the Checkers Sixty60 app came about;
•Why Valoyi believes the Post Office is key to driving e-commerce growth in South Africa;
•Why the medical sector is ripe for e-commerce disruption; and
•How technologies like artificial intelligence are changing the online shopping experience.
Don’t miss the interview! TechCentral
Twice yearly, ESET publishes its Threat Report in which it unpacks the latest trends and developments in the world of information security.
Adrian Stanford, group chief technology officer at ESET Southern Africa, is our guest in the latest episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, and he provides a succinct overview of the key trends identified in the latest ESET Threat Report, for the first half of 2024.
Stanford provides a brief overview of the findings before delving into:
•The threat posed by generative AI, including how bad actors are using the technology to break into systems and target victims;
•The rise of deepfakes and the threat they pose, particularly in mobile;
•The threat posed to Linux-based systems – and why there’s a misconception that malware doesn’t target Linux (or macOS); and
•The latest on plug-in malware impacting WordPress-based websites.
Don’t miss this informative discussion about the evolving world of cyberthreats and how they could impact you and your business. TechCentral
South African scientists have launched a cost-effective air-quality monitoring system built using internet of things and artificial intelligence technologies.
Bruce Mellado, professor of particle physics and director of the Institute for Collider Particle Physics at Wits University, is one of the key people behind the new initiative, which is aimed at improving air quality in South Africa and eventually other markets around the world. He recently joined Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show to discuss the project.
Mellado, who also director at the iThemba Laboratories for Accelerator Based Sciences – a unit of South Africa’s National Research Foundation – takes TechCentral through the devices, how they were built and how they’re being deployed in South Africa to detect reportable problems with air quality.
“We decided to create, for the first time in South Africa, a cost-effective air-quality monitoring system based on sensors, IoT and AI. We have named this system Ai_r.,” Mellado wrote in a recent article for The Conversation and published on TechCentral.
“Our team of 25 people includes more than 20 years of experience as particle physicists in working with sensors, communications and AI,” he wrote.
“There are only 130 big air-quality measuring stations in South Africa. They only measure the air quality in the vicinity of the station. This is why we need cost-effective, dense networks made up of Ai_r systems set up all around these stations, to measure air quality in a much wider area. Our vision is to place tens of thousands of these devices all over South Africa.”
In this episode of TCS, Mellado chats about:
•The latest developments in particle physics, some of the work he is involved in and how a particle physicist got involved in an air-quality monitoring project;
•Where the idea for the Ai_r device came from, its development and how it works;
•The role of IoT and AI in the device, and why the development team made the technology choices it did;
•The data that’s been collected so far, and what it can be used for;
•How much the solution costs, and how you can buy one to monitor your air quality at home.
Don’t miss a great conversation! TechCentral
Jorge Mendes has been in the hot seat at Cell C for just over a year, and the turnaround at the long-troubled mobile operator is starting to gain traction.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), Mendes sits down with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod for a detailed interview in which he provides an update on what’s happened in the past year at Cell C, paints of a picture of the state of the business today, and sets out what comes next for the mobile operator.
To signal the management team’s intentions, and to declare the business is on a new strategic footing and is in the market for the long term, Cell C recently refreshed its brand identity and signalled its intention to take back market share from its bigger rivals.
In this episode of TCS, Mendes tackles a range of questions, including:
•Why he left what seemed to be a plum job at Vodacom to take on the difficult challenge of turning around Cell C;
•What went through his mind in the first few days on the job;
•Cell C’s plan to recapture the title of third largest mobile operator from Telkom – and to take the fight to MTN and Vodacom;
•Why Cell C has struggled to compete, how it accumulated huge amounts of debt and why the new strategy is its best but last chance of success;
•The state of Cell C’s finances – and especially its balance sheet – following the recent recapitalisation led by its largest shareholder, Blue Label Telecoms;
•His relationship with Blue Label founders and co-CEOs Brett Levy and Mark Levy;
•The role of regulatory support, especially in call termination;
•Why Cell C handed back the spectrum it secured in the 2022 spectrum auction, and its plans for participation in future auctions;
•The role of mobile virtual network operators and wholesale services in Cell C’s recovery plan; and
•Cell C’s strategy to capture more of the lucrative contract market.
There’s plenty more in the interview with Mendes – don’t miss the conversation! TechCentral
Meet the CIO is presented by Wipro.
There is much more to being a chief information officer than being an advocate of the latest technology. In fact, articulating a vision, and architecting it, is critical.
That’s according to Shabhana Thaver, CIO at Investec Specialist Bank, who is the guest in the hot seat in episode 2 of TechCentral’s new interview series, Meet the CIO, which is presented by Wipro.
According to Thaver, technology is changing banking and many other industries in fundamental ways, and CIOs need to play a big role in providing an holistic view to the rest of the C-suite of what those changes mean for their company and for their industry.
“You have to be a risk officer, you have to be a compliance officer, you have to be a CIO, you have to understand the commercials and the revenue side of things… I'm a technologist, I love the fancy new stuff and dabbling and playing with it, but being in in a bank, which is systemic, you have to consider the impact of what you are doing, not just the change and the benefit.”
In the interview, Thaver discusses:
•Her career background in software development, and what led her to Johannesburg from Durban, her hometown, and then to Investec;
•Her career at Investec, leading to her appointment as CIO;
•The role of the CIO in a modern bank like Investec, and how the role of an IT leader differs in a bank compared to other industries;
•What makes a good CIO – and the role the CIO should play in helping establish organisational strategy;
•The big IT projects she is leading at Investec and the impact these will have on the bank;
•Investec’s technology stack and how it compares to other banks in South Africa;
•The likely impact of artificial intelligence – including generative AI – on Investec and its clients, including a look at how the bank is approaching AI;
•How AI will impact the banking industry – as well as what it means for productivity and jobs; and
•How else technology is changing the banking industry
Don’t miss a fascinating interview. TechCentral
The big mobile network operators in South Africa “have never shown a willingness to … accommodate smaller players”, so the notion that they should be entitled to “Fair Share” is “difficult to swallow for smaller operators who have been at the end of their [unfair] business practices”.
That’s the view of Dominic Cull, a leading specialist South African ICT lawyer and regulatory adviser to the Internet Service Providers’ Association (Ispa), who was speaking to the TechCentral Show (TCS) in an interview (published below).
Cull’s criticism of Fair Share – at least in the form being advanced by the large telecoms operators – comes as the Association of Comms & Technology (ACT), a lobby group that represents the country’s largest telecoms providers, agitates for its adoption by policymakers in South Africa.
Fair Share is an idea that has gained traction among operators in Europe, where margins have been pressured in a competitive market. They argue that so-called OTT – “over the top” – companies, which include streaming video providers such as Netflix, Disney+ and TikTok, should contribute a “fair share” to the development of broadband infrastructure.
Critics have said this is simply a move by infrastructure providers, which have experienced margin compression with the move from voice to data services, to try to claw back lost profits.
Speaking at last month’s Datacentrix Showcase 2024 event in Sandton, ICT industry stalwart Andile Ngcaba – who founded Convergence Partners – said the move by ACT to pressure policymakers and regulators over “Fair Share” is not needed or wanted in the South African context.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” said Ngcaba, who is a previous policymaker in South Africa and who served as director-general of communications in the Nelson Mandela administration.
In the interview with TCS, Cull echoed this view and said ACT’s lobbying for Fair Share is partly aimed at “catching the ear” of newly appointed communications minister Solly Malatsi and influencing what is included in forthcoming amendments to legislation that governs the ICT sector in South Africa.
In this episode of TCS, Cull chats about:
•Whether ACT has a point about Fair Share;
•How big content players impact smaller operators and internet service providers, and why the call for Fair Share is coming from the industry’s biggest players;
•The investments by the OTT players in both terrestrial and subsea fibre infrastructure, including Google’s investment in the Equiano cable and Meta Platforms’ involvement in 2Africa;
•Whether mobile network operators doomed to become low-margin “dumb pipes” like other utility industries. Can they somehow avoid that fate?
Don’t miss the discussion, and if you enjoyed it, check out our December 2023 interview with Dominic Cull on Starlink in South Africa. TechCentral
What does it take to build and maintain South Africa’s largest wholesale telecommunications network? Robert Jorge, chief network officer at Openserve, unpacks what is involved in this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+.
In the latest in a five-part series of interviews with Openserve executives – you can find the other episodes in the series here – Jorge shares what is involved in building a modern telecoms network and how the company makes the technology decisions it does.
Jorge unpacks:
•What sets the Openserve network apart from other networks in South Africa;
•What the network looks like – from fibre to the home to national backhaul routes to international subsea cables;
•How Openserve’s network teams measure success – including a look at how the company measures reliability and how it achieves high availability through network design principles;
•The project to remove legacy copper infrastructure – which is outdated, expensive and prone to theft – from the Openserve network;
•The impact of load shedding and load reduction on the company’s infrastructure, and what it has done to cope with unreliable electricity supply; and
•What advances in technology mean for the future of the Openserve network – and what this means for businesses and consumers.
It is a fascinating discussion – do not miss it! TechCentral
Super Group, the New York-listed parent of Betway and other online betting brands, has achieved significant gains in efficiency and productivity through its partnership with Workday, the cloud-based enterprise software company.
The company has deployed Workday’s software, and Neil Greybe, its human resources information systems manager, tells TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology show about how it has derived significant value from the investment – including in improved consistency, simplification, integration, prioritisation and change management.
Greybe is joined on this episode of TCS+ by Workday South Africa MD Kiv Moodley, who expands on the relationship between the two companies.
In the discussion, the two chat about:
•Greybe’s role at Super Group and the company’s focus areas;
•Workday’s presence in South Africa and its strategic priorities for this market;
•The vision and strategy for Workday, and how that ties in with the Changemakers theme of this series of TCS+ interviews with Workday and its clients;
•Greybe’s top priorities in his role at Super Group, and how these tie in with the role technology can play in supporting and growing the business;
•Super Group’s relationship with Workday and how the company uses the software in its day-to-day operations;
•The value that Super Group has derived from its investment in Workday; and
•Workday’s role as a “trusted adviser” to its clients, including Super Group.
Don’t miss a great discussion! TechCentral
Former Britehouse CEO Scott Gibson was recently appointed as chief executive of enterprise asset management company Pragma. He is the guest in this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS).
Gibson, who also previously headed Dimension Data’s (now NTT Data’s) global digital practice, tells TCS about his appointment and why he decided to join Pragma, which develops a software platform in South Africa that it exports to companies around the world. Gibson plans to step up that internationalisation effort as CEO.
“Pragma’s software competes comfortably with the world’s top brands, such as SAP, Maximo and IFS Ultimo. I plan to use my experience growing software businesses to help Pragma achieve its international expansion goals,” he says.
Co-founder and outgoing CEO Adriaan Scheeres, who led Pragma for 34 years, will remain a shareholder and member of the board.
In the interview, Gibson chats about:
•Pragma’s history and what it does;
•The size of the business, and the opportunities he sees abroad for the company;
•Its clients;
•The trends in the enterprise software market; and
•The application of artificial intelligence.
Don’t miss the conversation! TechCentral
Openserve, South Africa’s biggest telecommunications infrastructure provider, has been through enormous changes in the nine years since it became a separate brand and a subsidiary of the Telkom Group in 2015.
In the latest podcast in a five-part series of interviews with Openserve executives, the company’s CEO, Althon Beukes, tells TechCentral’s TCS+ about these changes and what they have meant for the company and the broader market, including its internet service provider partners.
Beukes provides an overview of these changes, including the recent spinoff of Openserve into a separate subsidiary within Telkom.
In the interview, Beukes reflects on:
•The changing dynamics of the telecoms infrastructure market in South Africa;
•Why there’s been a slowdown in the roll-out of fibre-optic networks;
•How Openserve is performing considering the broader market context;
•How load shedding and load reduction have impacted Openserve, and the investments it has made to overcome the challenge;
•The shift away from legacy copper technologies and the big growth in next-generation services, and what’s driving that demand;
•The potential for industry consolidation – and why much depends on the outcome of the ongoing Competition Tribunal investigation into Vodacom’s acquisition of up to a 40% stake in Vumatel parent company Maziv;
•What Openserve would like to see flowing from the Competition Tribunal process; and
•Openserve’s future plans, including where it’s headed in the coming years.
Do not miss a fascinating discussion – and the rest of the interviews in the series. TechCentral
Herman Maritz, one half of the pair that developed the ESP load shedding app (formerly known as EskomSePush), is grateful that Eskom may finally have load shedding licked – even if that means fewer people are using the app.
Maritz, who returns to the TechCentral Show (TCS) – he was last a guest in 2021 – reflects on the past four-and-a-half months without load shedding, and what that’s meant for ESP – apart from giving himself and his business partner, Dan Southwood-Wells, to focus on other projects.
In this episode of TCS, Maritz unpacks the impact of the suspension of load shedding, what that’s meant for advertising and subscriptions on the platform, and what’s next for ESP.
He also chats about:
•How ESP is helping communities with load reduction;
•How they’re using generative artificial intelligence in the app; and
•The opportunities to launch the software in new markets.
Lastly, he reveals a few interesting statistics about ESP, including the number of times the app has been downloaded (it’s a staggering number). TechCentral
Openserve chief digital and strategy officer Pushkar Gokhale is TechCentral’s guest in this episode of the TCS+ business technology show, where he unpacks the role of digital services on the Telkom subsidiary’s growth ambitions.
Gokhale, who has worked for various telecommunications operators around the world, came to South Africa more than a decade ago and liked the country so much he decided to make it his home.
In this interview – which forms part of a series of TCS+ interviews with Openserve executives – Pushkar chats about:
•His career history, and what brought him to South Africa – and to Telkom and Openserve;
•The highlights of his career so far, and why he is passionate about telecoms and the opportunities around digital services;
•His role at Openserve and what his daily work entails;
•How digital services, including Openserve’s new consumer app, are playing a role in the company’s core business as a wholesaler of infrastructure services;
•The digital transformation of Openserve’s operations – what was involved and how it is changing the way it does business; and
•How Openserve works with partners, both locally and globally.
Don’t miss an insightful interview about one of South Africa’s most important infrastructure providers. TechCentral
In this episode of TechCentral’s business technology show TCS+, Africa Data Centres regional executive for South Africa Angus Hay discusses the significant upgrades taking place at the company’s Samrand facility in Gauteng.
Africa Data Centres is in the midst of a major upgrade cycle at the facility known as JHB 2.
The colocation facility, which is one of the few tier-4 data centres in Africa, was originally designed to handle 10MW of IT load. When the upgrades are completed in 2025, the facility will house an additional 20MW.
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In this informative discussion, Hay delves into:
-The drivers behind the upgrades at Samrand and how “hyperscalers” will benefit from them;
-The security standards at the facility and the implications for highly sensitive clients such as the financial sector;
-The energy redundancies that ensure continuous operations at the facility, even in the event of grid collapse;
-Innovations Africa Data Centres uses to manage the efficient use of energy at the facility; and
-Initiatives to minimise Africa Data Centres’ carbon footprint by investing in renewable energy sources.
Don’t miss this lively discussion in which Hay provides a behind-the-scenes peek into the inner workings of state-of-the-art data centres, the powerhouses of the modern internet. TechCentral
In this first in a series of interviews with Openserve executives, TechCentral’s TCS+ speaks to the company’s chief commercial officer, Phila Dube, about its business model, how it works with partners and why it has embraced the concept of “open access”.
Openserve, which is a subsidiary of the Telkom Group, is South Africa’s biggest telecommunications infrastructure provider with more than 170 000km of national fibre footprint and fibre broadband connections into homes in all provinces across South Africa.
In this episode of TCS+, Dube unpacks:
•His role in Openserve, where he oversees the company’s market-facing activities such as business development, product lifecycle management, commercial economics, operations, and marketing and communications;
•The changes that Openserve has been through in the past 10 years, and what these mean for the market, including the company’s internet service provider partners;
•All the markets that the company is involved in, from home and business broadband to national long-distance links and subsea cables;
•The advantages and challenges associated with Openserve’s chosen go-to-market model of B2B2C, or business-to-business-to-consumer;
•Openserve’s plans to further expand and commercialise its network assets; and
•Why the company became a champion of the open-access model.
Don’t miss this opening interview in a fascinating series about one of South Africa’s most important infrastructure operators. TechCentral
Meet the CIO is presented by Wipro.
Bruce Paveley says that when he moved from a senior IT role at Standard Bank in 2017 to the then-nascent start-up digital bank TymeBank, it was “a really big shock”.
“You go from five buildings in the middle of Joburg, multiple floors, to an office in Rosebank that’s two floors, and that’s the bank, and you think, ‘Wow, is this really a bank? Can it work like this?”
That was before TymeBank had launched its first commercial services, and long before it would go on to become South Africa’s most successful digital banking start-up with nearly 10 million customers and R6-billion in deposits and R3-billion in loans.
Paveley’s love for computers started when his dad bought him a Sinclair ZX81 in the early 1980s when he was a youngster growing up in the small north coast town of Empangeni.
Today, as chief technology officer at Tymebank, Paveley is leading a team that’s building the technology underpinnings (cloud-based, of course) of a modern digital bank. And it’s a fascinating story about using technology to challenge established industry incumbents.
In this first episode of TechCentral’s new podcast series, Meet the CIO (presented by Wipro), Paveley chats to Duncan McLeod about what was involved in launching TymeBank from a technology perspective, the strategic choices it made and why, and what comes next in the bank’s journey.
Paveley tells Meet the CIO about:
•His upbringing in Empangeni and how he ended up pursuing a career in IT
•The mainframe era, and his experience as a Cobol programmer
•His IT career at Standard Bank, including his involvement in the bank’s big SAP project
•Why he joined TymeBank
•What was involved in building the new bank, and the role that technology played
•TymeBank’s technology stack, and why the bank migrated from an on-premises solution to the cloud – and why it made the technology choices it did
•Tyme Group’s internationalisation plans, and how technology is underpinning that expansion
•How he works with the rest of the bank’s management team, and where technology fits into strategic decision-making
•TymeBank’s approach to cybersecurity
•What keeps him awake at night
•And much, much more
Meet the CIO is a new podcast series produced and published by TechCentral and published monthly. We talk to IT leaders across South Africa about the role of technology in their organisations. Don’t miss an episode by subscribing to TechCentral at youtube.com/techcentral. TechCentral
The 24th of February 2022 is a day Ronnie Apteker – and millions of his countrymen in his adopted home of Ukraine – will never forget.
Apteker woke up early that morning – as millions of others did – to the sound of bombs and missiles raining down. After months of military build-up along Ukraine’s eastern flank, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin had ordered a full-scale invasion.
In this special edition of the TechCentral Show, we chat to Apteker – a pioneer in South Africa’s internet industry – about his life in Ukraine amid the ongoing war.
Apteker has a storied career as co-founder of Internet Solutions, one of South Africa’s first and most successful internet service providers. He is also well known as a producer and promoter of movies, including Material and Beyond the River.
In 2015 Apteker bought an apartment in Kyiv and started a new life in the city, attracted by the country’s diverse tech scene and its incredibly beauty.
He had established a new and promising life for himself in Ukraine – he married a local woman, Marta, with whom he has a young boy (affectionately called “the Bunster”). Both Marta and the Bunster are now refugees from the war, living in Poland.
Never in a million years did Apteker expect he would be caught up in a major conflict, never mind the biggest land war in Europe since World War 2.
Today his life involves moving between Poland and Kyiv, where he has friends as well as business interests in the tech sector which he continues to nurture despite the chaos caused by Putin’s aggression.
In this sometimes emotionally raw interview, Apteker tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about why he left South Africa to go and live in Ukraine, how the war started (he woke up early one morning to missiles raining down on Kyiv), what it’s like to live in a warzone, and how he’s coping with the daily hardships caused by the conflict.
Apteker, who is known for his wicked sense of humour – in a previous life he was even briefly a stand-up comedian – admits it’s been exceptionally difficult to stay positive about the future, but that he’s managed to keep going even us Putin’s war machine grinds on.
In the interview, Apteker chats about his daily life now and what it entails; the US election, and why Ukrainians fear another Donald Trump presidency; the new documentary film about the war that he’s been working on; his passion for moviemaking; and why love is the most important thing in the world.
Don’t miss the interview. TechCentral
The Volvo EX30 is undoubtedly one of the most exciting electric cars to be launched in South Africa in 2024.
The vehicle, whose price starts at R792 000, offers a combination of price, performance and luxury tweaks that has attracted considerable appeal among South African consumers interested in making the switch to electric mobility.
But what is the Volvo EX30 like to drive?
TechCentral recently had the opportunity to spend time with the twin-motor version of the EX30 to put it through its paces. Apart from a few minor niggles, including the quality of materials used in the dashboard, we can confidently say this is a very compelling option for those interested in buying an EV in the sub-R1-million price category.
While it’s not as affordable as more entry-level EV models from the likes of China’s BYD, the vehicle offers many luxuries usually reserved for more expensive EVs, including a panoramic (non-opening) sunroof, high-end Harman Kardon audio and well-thought-out software features.
It’s easy to see where Volvo has compromised to get the price down, but the decisions it has made in this regard have mostly been carefully considered.
As for the driving experience, the power underfoot is extraordinary. The twin motor version TechCentral tested accelerated from 0-100km/h more quickly than a Porsche 911 – it really is a thrill to drive!
This is a sentiment shared by Greg Cress, who owns the EX30 and has been driving it since March, when he took delivery from Volvo. Cress joined TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) recently to review the vehicle and to talk about the state of the EV market more broadly in South Africa.
Cress, who works for Accenture – where he is principal director of automotive and e-mobility – told TCS about his experiences with the vehicle and what he likes about it and what he doesn’t.
He unpacks his experiences so far, including with the regular software updates that Volvo has issued and why he settled on the EX30 over other EV options available in the South African market. He also shares details about a recent long-distance return trip he did from Pretoria to White River in Mpumalanga and how he found utilising the charging points along South Africa’s national roads.
Then, in the second part of the TCS interview, Cress shares his views on the state of the EV market in South Africa, what is hindering its wider adoption and the outlook for electric mobility in the country.
Don’t miss a hugely informative interview. TechCentral
Identity theft is a massive and growing problem that requires smart risk mitigation strategies.
That is one of the key messages coming out of a TechCentral TCS+ interview with executives from CYBER1 Solutions and iiDENTIFii.
CYBER1 Solutions security architect Christiaan Swanepoel and iiDENTIFii co-founder and chief technology officer Marco Wagener unpack the subject in greater detail in the interview.
They discuss:
•The background to iiDENTIFii and its relationship with CYBER1 Solutions;
•The current trends in identity theft, and why this type of theft is a growing concern for businesses;
•How iiDENTIFii’s software can play a big role in fighting the scourge of identity theft;
•What companies are doing right and wrong in fighting the problem;
•How businesses can enhance their identity verification process to mitigate against the risk of identity theft;
•iiDENTIFii’s solutions, and how they integrate with existing corporate systems; and
•The role that cybersecurity tools can play in protecting personal identities;
Swanepoel and Wagener also share their insights into future trends in the identity verification market and how businesses can prepare themselves.
This is an important discussion for anyone involved in IT, but especially for those involved in cybersecurity – don’t miss it! TechCentral
South Africa’s telecommunications industry is facing a barrage of threats, from crime and vandalism to power cuts and overreach by politicians.
This is the word from Nomvuyiso Batyi, CEO of telecommunications industry lobby group the Association for Comms & Technology (ACT) and an industry stalwart who served as a councillor at communications regulator Icasa for eight years and as special adviser to the minister of communications. She was speaking to TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (watch or listen to the interview below).
ACT, which represents the six big telecoms operators in South Africa – MTN, Vodacom, Rain, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Telkom and Cell C – was founded two years ago as an interface between the industry and policymakers and regulators.
In the interview, Batyi unpacks a range of issues affecting ACT members. She discusses:
•Her first engagement with newly appointed communications minister Solly Malatsi, and her views on him;
•What her day-to-day work involves;
•Why government shouldn’t be setting deadlines for 2G and 3G switch-off in South Africa;
•Import taxes on cellphones, and why luxury taxes on 4G devices should be scrapped;
•How the load shedding problem has been replaced with the load reduction problem, and what the impact has been on operators;
•The scourge of theft and vandalism, and why urgent action is needed to address the problem; and
•South Africa’s upcoming spectrum auction, and why telecoms operators should get access to spectrum below 694MHz that has traditionally been reserved for broadcasting.
Don’t miss the interview! TechCentral
Andy Higgins, founder of e-commerce solutions company Bob Group, knows more about e-commerce in South Africa than most people.
Higgins founded Bidorbuy (now Bob Shop) at the height of the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, and over the past 25 years has actively participated in the industry as it has mushroomed from those nascent beginnings.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), Higgins has a look back at the growth of the industry, and what’s likely to propel its future expansion.
In the show, Higgins unpacks:
•How Bob Group has done since it was created nearly two years ago through the merger of Bidorbuy and uAfrica, and what the future holds for the business;
•What is driving the rapid growth in South Africa’s e-commerce industry – did Covid lockdowns give it the spark for its current rapid expansion, or is there more at play?;
•The rise of on-demand deliveries in South Africa and what it means for online retailers;
•The rise of Chinese competitors – how much of a threat are Shein and Temu really, and is the South African Revenue Service right to crack down?;
•The Competition Commission’s intervention in the market and whether it is warranted;
•Whether Amazon’s South African launch was a flop; and
•What trends to look out for as the market develops further in the coming years.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion! TechCentral
Customer relationship management software giant Salesforce recently showcased the power of its latest artificial intelligence and cloud-based solutions to customers, partners and associates at Salesforce World Tour Essentials Johannesburg, held at the Kyalami Convention Centre in Midrand.
In this episode of TechCentral’s business technology show, TCS+, Zuko Mdwaba, Salesforce area vice president/Africa executive and South Africa country leader, shares highlights from the event. He also provides insight into the company’s plans for South Africa and Africa.
More than 2 200 global and local leaders attended the Salesforce event in Johannesburg, demonstrating the huge interest in AI and digital transformation in South Africa, with organisations from across a range of sectors eager to learn more about new technologies that will allow them to leverage their data more fully and grow their businesses.
The Salesforce ecosystem of partners in the South African region has grown 34% year on year, but the most significant improvement is in the area of certifications, with an increase of 43% in the same period. These partners, Mdwaba explains in the TCS+ interview, are helping organisations across all sectors to raise employee productivity and transform with real-time insights and new levels of customer experience.
Mdwaba shares data from International Data Corp, which shows Salesforce and its partner ecosystem is being fuelled by AI- powered cloud solutions and will generate US$5.8-billion in net new business between 2022 and 2028.
In the interview, Mdwaba delves into:
•The economic impact that the Salesforce ecosystem is going to have on South Africa in the next few years.
•How the combination of CRM, cloud, data and trust is transforming organisations.
•How Salesforce is ramping up its skills development and talent programme in Africa to build the workforce that will help drive its aspirations for the continent.
Finally, he speaks about some of the infrastructural challenges on the continent and where the opportunities for technological innovation and business growth lie.
Don’t miss the interview! TechCentral
Braintree’s Grant van der Westhuizen and Heath Huxtable tell TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology show about how to acquire software that solves present and future business needs.
This might sound simple, but software purchases are complex and expensive. For companies to get their money’s worth, properly diagnosing the problem a new piece of software ought to solve and ensuring that the solution is futureproof are key to extracting the most value from a purchase.
In this episode of TCS+, Huxtable – MD at Braintree – and Van der Westhuizen, the company’s business applications sales manager, tell TCS+ about important considerations companies should take into account when looking to solve business problems through software.
Huxtable and van der Westhuizen delve into:
•How customers don’t really know what they want because they tend to hyperfocus on solving pain points instead of looking at the bigger picture;
•Balancing short-term vs long-term thinking in purchasing decisions;
•The importance of unlocking value versus thinking of software as a grudge purchase;
•The flexibility provided by the Microsoft suite of business applications;
•How to balance personalised solutions with maintaining a consolidated view in multi-faceted business; and
•How to deal with resistance from employees in implementation projects, especially where artificial intelligence is involved.
Huxtable and Van der Westhuizen are passionate about using software to drive value creation in business, and their energy comes through vividly in this interview. Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
A 2023 report by International Data Corporation (IDC) found that an astonishing 96% of CIOs in South Africa plan to modernise their ERP applications using cloud services. Yet actual implementation has stalled.
To discuss this, and what’s holding South African organisations back from cloud modernisation projects, TechCentral was joined on the TCS+ business technology show by executives from NTT Data (formerly Dimension Data) and SAP: NTT Data Middle East and Africa head of enterprise applications and cloud Brent Flint and SAP Africa head of partner ecosystem (MEA South) Nazia Pillay.
Reasons for slow uptake, Flint and Pillay explained, include a perception that the costs involved are exceptionally high and the dire shortage of the right IT skills to handle these types of projects.
In this episode of TCS+, Pillay and Flint unpack:
•The history of the relationship between SAP and NTT Data and how the two companies work together today;
•Why there is a pressing need for companies to modernise their ERP systems and move to cloud-based solutions;
•The benefits of and costs associated with moving to SAP S4/HANA Cloud – what the software offers that legacy ERP systems can’t, and the benefits organisations can expect when migrating;
•How best to deal with the critical IT skills shortage in South Africa, especially around these types of business application modernisation projects;
•The risks associated with business application modernisation and how NTT Data and SAP help their clients address those risks upfront and during project implementation;
•The role SAP S/4 HANA Cloud can play in modernising enterprise IT infrastructure and help organisations stay competitive;
•The best practices companies should be aware of in achieving a successful migration to S4/HANA Cloud; and
•What’s coming next from S4/HANA Cloud that companies should get excited about.
If you’re in any way involved in enterprise IT, you don’t want to miss this discussion. TechCentral
A new smart payment ring has been launched in South Africa – and it’s built by South Africans for South Africans.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod chats to VezoPay founders Jake Pinkus and Lawrence Baker about the launch of the ring – it’s available in three variants at launch – and what was behind the idea.
In the interview, they not only explain why they decided to build a payment ring, but also why they’re entering what could soon become a highly competitive market globally, with both Samsung Electronics and Apple expected to launch their own smart rings later this year.
Pinkus and Lawrence unpack:
•How long they’ve been working on the payment ring, and where the idea came from;
•How much research and development was involved, and who’s backing the innovation;
•How the technology works, and what exactly is inside the ring;
•The various options available at launch;
•How it works without having to be charged;
•How the security features work (without giving the game away);
•How VezoPay is working with South African banks;
•Whether the ring can be used for ticketing (concerts, Gautrain, etc);
•How much it costs;
•The potential competition from Samsung and Apple; and
•VezoPay’s plans to expand beyond South Africa’s borders.
Don’t miss the interview! TechCentral
The 2Africa submarine communications cable, which will be the longest such system in the world when it’s completed, is already helping one South African internet service provider find an alternative route for its data traffic between KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape.
2Africa’s eastern segment – known as 2Africa Gera – is largely complete, and traffic is already flowing across the section that connects Durban and Cape Town, thanks to a newly concluded agreement between 2Africa investor WIOCC Group and FirstNet Technology Services, an ISP in the First Technologies Group stable.
To discuss this development and unpack it in more detail, TechCentral invited WIOCC director of sales for South Africa Carlos De Almeida and FirstNet GM Sean van Niekerk onto the TCS+ business technology podcast.
In the show, De Almeida discusses the scale of the 180Tbit/s design capacity 2Africa cable, its state of readiness and WIOCC’s investment in the massive system, which, when completed, will stretch a staggering 45 000km and connect countries with a combined population of more than three billion people.
De Almeida and Van Niekerk discuss:
•Why FirstNet acquired capacity on 2Africa to carry network traffic between KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape – becoming the first company to do so;
•Why routing via a subsea cable, rather than using traditional terrestrial long-distance routes, should mean far fewer service interruptions for FirstNet customers;
•FirstNet’s focus as an ISP, and why it launched a brand called UrbanXConnect dedicated to the gaming community and their specific requirements around latency and network quality;
•The reliability, speeds and latencies possible on the 2Africa cable, and why this is critical for FirstNet; and
•Why, in WIOCC’s view, other ISPs could and should follow FirstNet’s lead in using the 2Africa cable for their national long-distance internet traffic.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion about a pioneering agreement. TechCentral
Asokan Moodley is leading Nedbank’s drive into the world of AI – and it is already starting to have a meaningful impact on productivity in the bank.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, Moodley – Nedbank Group Technology’s head of end user and communication experience, infrastructure and operations – unpacks what the bank is doing with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and the lessons learnt so far from the deployment of the technology.
Nedbank, which is one of the first organisations in South Africa to deploy Copilot for Microsoft 365, has made the technology available to select employees, including senior management, ahead of a planned wider deployment.
In the interview, Moodley discusses:
•Why Nedbank decided to be a relatively early adopter of Copilot for Microsoft 365;
•Which employees the technology has been deployed to initially and why they were chosen;
•The business challenges the bank is hoping the technology will address;
•The important lessons learnt so far, and how other companies should be approaching their deployments;
•The potential pitfalls of using advanced AI tools in a highly regulated industry like banking;
•The security concerns, and how Nedbank is addressing these; and
•How the bank helped employees embrace AI tools in their day-to-day work, and the feedback they have provided regarding their use of the technology.
Moodley also shares his views on whether AI tools, including Copilot for Microsoft 365, provide a competitive edge in both the short and the long term.
If your organisation is thinking of deploying AI technology to its employees – and especially if it’s considering Copilot for Microsoft 365 – this is a conversation you shouldn’t miss, especially as Moodley shares his views on how leaders in other organisations who have embarked on a similar journey should approach this. TechCentral
Kartik Mistry, recently appointed head of Standard Bank Connect, believes there is still strong growth ahead for South Africa’s mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) market.
Standard Bank, which recently rebranded its MVNO from Standard Bank Mobile to Standard Bank Connect and shifted its network partner from Cell C to MTN South Africa, has launched a new value proposition in cellular communications for its customers.
TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod is joined by Mistry on the TechCentral Show, where he explains the bank’s decision to partner with MTN and why it decided to engage directly with a mobile network operator rather than working through an “enablement” partner as it had done previously.
Kartik, who has experience in both telecommunications – he has previously served as chief operating officer at Rain – and in banking, talks about the state of the MVNO market in South Africa, where Standard Bank Connect is positioning itself strategically, and why the market might be primed for consolidation.
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
HP, long been a leader in the technology space, launched the Amplify Partner Program in 2021. The programme has since gone from strength to strength. Through its dynamic nature, it stands out as one of the most powerful partner programmes in the technology space.
In this episode of the TechCentral’s TCS+ series, HP Southern Africa MD Yesh Surjoodeen discusses Amplify in more detail, and explains how it is taking HP partners across the globe to new heights.
Surjoodeen unpacks the origin of the programme along with the latest updates announced in Las Vegas earlier this year at HP’s Amplify Partner Conference.
Additionally, he explains how the programme is helping partners drive AI readiness and technology adoption among customers, alongside empowering partners to make a positive impact in sustainability and environmental awareness.
HP has set itself apart in the way it supports the channel and end-user customers. Watch or listen to the interview with Surjoodeen to learn more about HP’s Amplify Partner Program. TechCentral
Alan Kemp, director at Iris Network Systems, has a long history in South Africa’s internet service provider industry. So, he knows all too well how load shedding can play havoc with internet and telecommunications networks, and the teams employed to ensure their smooth functioning.
Iris Network Systems is a specialist South African service provider that specialises in network monitoring and management, with a historical focus on ISPs and operators, and currently entering the Enterprise market. Being in this space in South Africa presents several real challenges, not least of them dealing with the chaos caused by Eskom’s rolling power cuts.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology show, Kemp tells Duncan McLeod about the impact of load shedding on networking monitoring and management, and the solution Iris has developed to lessen the aggravation caused to network support teams.
Kemp unpacks how Iris assists companies impacted by load shedding as well as the company’s full solution set.
If you’re an ISP or network operator, you’ll not want to miss this discussion. TechCentral
Promoted | Check Point’s Rudi van Rooyen explains why cloud security is not as straightforward as organisations might assume.
The software security landscape is in a constant state of flux.
According to research undertaken by Check Point Software Technologies – an AI-powered, cloud-delivered cybersecurity platform provider protecting over 100 000 organisations worldwide – African organisations have been attacked on average 2 508 times a week in the last six months. This compares to 1 379 per organisation globally.
Some 70% of malicious files impacting African organisations were delivered via e-mail in the last 30 days, while the most common vulnerability exploit type is “information disclosure”, impacting 75% of organisations.
The race is therefore on between threat actors looking to exploit organisations and cybersecurity experts who protect sensitive organisational data.
In this episode of TCS+, Rudi van Rooyen, security engineer at Check Point Software Africa, offers a deep dive into the ins and outs of software system security for organisations of any size.
Van Rooyen unpacks:
•Why cloud migration is not a cure-all for software security issues in an organisation, and how security in a cloud setting should be approached.
•How Check Point manages to maintain a prevention-first approach to cybersecurity despite new types of attacks being developed daily.
•How AI is helping the chief information security officer cope with skills shortages and overwork by simplifying security operations.
•How Check Point’s virtual CISO function assists security leads in addressing their cybersecurity concerns.
•Insights into how much cybercrime impacts the South African economy.
•What Check Point recommends organisations do to better protect themselves against cybercriminals.
Insightful, important and sometimes technical, this discussion is critical for any information security expert or business owner looking to better protect their enterprise against cyber threats.
* This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned TechCentral
MultiChoice Group has been involved in two major enforcement actions against piracy kingpins in as many weeks.
Frikkie Jonker, of MultiChoice subsidiary Irdeto, is the man leading the charge against these pirate operations, and he tells the TechCentral Show (TCS) that, despite recent arrests, the broadcaster’s war on streaming piracy is just getting started. More arrests and other enforcement actions are on the cards.
On 5 June, MultiChoice revealed it had succeeding in nailing the streaming piracy platform Waka TV in an operation that involved Western Cape police investigators. It described the dismantling of Waka TV as “a significant victory in the fight against internet streaming piracy”.
The broadcaster said it was involved in a “meticulously planned raid” on 31 May, which led to the arrest of a “key suspect involved in one of the most extensive pirate operations in Africa”.
A day later, on 6 June, the broadcaster announced that through Irdeto – and working with law enforcement agencies – it had acted against another pirate streaming operation, this one in Gauteng, where a suspect was arrested for the “illegal sale of internet streaming pirate devices that allowed individuals to access MultiChoice content”.
Jonker, who is antipiracy director in broadcasting and cybersecurity at Irdeto, takes TechCentral’s audience into some detail about the two law enforcement operations and what transpired. And he explains why MultiChoice is stepping up its battle against content thieves and pirate streaming operations in South Africa and the rest of the African continent.
In the interview, Jonker unpacks:
•How serious content piracy has become on the continent;
•Why it’s often associated with organised criminal syndicates, and why consumers are putting themselves at risk by signing up to pirate streaming platforms as well as encouraging further criminal activity;
•Why MultiChoice is now warning that, in addition to targeting the pirate platform operators, it may go after consumers who sign up to these platforms, too; and
•How the broadcaster is working with law enforcement authorities.
Don’t miss a fascinating conversation. TechCentral
Artificial intelligence technologies will be used by both threat actors and those fighting cybercrime, and will bring about fundamental changes in the information security industry.
This is the view of Adrian Stanford, group chief technology officer at ESET Southern Africa, who was speaking to TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology show this week.
Stanford, who is immersed in the world of infosec, unpacks how cyberattackers are using – and will expand their use of – generative AI tools to achieve their nefarious objectives, and how cybersecurity professionals can utilise the same technologies to fight back and improve defences.
He unpacks:
•The key trends shaping the infosec landscape in 2024, including supply-chain attacks, deepfakes and nation state involvement;
•How AI factors into cybersecurity, including what threat actors are doing with the technology, and how AI will help companies like ESET fight the scourge of cybercrime;
•How future developments in AI will impact the infosec field, both good and bad; and
•The role of ESET in protecting internet users from harm as the AI arms race hots up.
Don’t miss this important discussion on a critically important topic to all organisations – big and small – in 2024. TechCentral
Pinnacle CEO Tim Humphreys-Davies and his management team are early adopters in South Africa of generative AI tools in the workplace.
He joins TechCentral’s TCS+ to talk about the experience, and the impact the technology is likely to have on business operations.
Pinnacle, which is one of South Africa’s top ICT distributors, is testing the technology with the aim of assisting its channel partners with the shift to AI tools and deploying these in end-user organisations.
Humphreys-Davies explains what Pinnacle’s experience of generative AI has been to date, and he shares his views on the likely impact on productivity of deploying the technology.
In the discussion, he unpacks:
•Pinnacle’s objectives in using generative AI internally;
•The company’s learnings so far;
•The challenges encountered; and
•The impediments to deploying the technology effectively, including data availability issues, the skills gap, and the risk and complexity involved.
He also discusses Pinnacle’s exclusive distribution agreement with Nvidia – whose chips are fuelling the generative AI boom – and the industries which he believes will be impacted by AI to the greatest degree.
Lastly, Humphreys-Davies explores where the technology might be going, and how he sees Pinnacle using it in the years ahead. TechCentral
Mark Todes has a fascinating story to tell. The South African technologist and entrepreneur is TechCentral’s guest in the final episode of season 1 of the popular TCS Legends podcast.
Todes, who is perhaps best known for helping fight Telkom’s attempts in the 1990s to extend its telecommunications monopoly to the internet, has a storied career that began in the mid-1970s in the pre-PC era of mainframes and minicomputers.
In this episode of TCS Legends, Todes tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the founding of Compustat with his long-time business partner Mendel Karpul and how they went on to develop a word processor called GhostWriter (the name of which Microsoft later tried to wrestle away from them).
In the show, Todes chats about:
•How he and Karpul got their start selling a bureau-based accounting solution for pharmacies – and how they got their first big break. The solution was developed in Fortran using punch cards and ran on a minicomputer from Digital Equipment Corporation;
•Their development of Survey 2000, a cadastral land surveying system – their first product for personal computers (developed by Hewlett-Packard, prior to the launch of the original IBM PC);
•The development of GhostWriter, which became an early DOS-based competitor to the likes of MultiMate, WordStar and WordPerfect.
•The launch of Internet Africa, a pioneering South African internet service provider that was later sold to Datatec (and later to Naspers);
•The early days of the internet industry in South Africa, the formation of the Internet Service Providers’ Association and the existential fight with Telkom over whether the telecommunications operator’s government-sanctioned monopoly included the provision of internet services;
•Working with Naspers, Mweb and the late Antonie Roux;
•The launch of Korbitech (and its later sale to Naspers); and
•How he and Karpul became early pioneers in the CD-ROM business.
There’s much more than this to Todes’s story, making him one of the true legends of South Africa’s technology industry. Don’t miss this concluding episode of season 1 of TCS Legends. The series will return for season 2 in 2025. TechCentral
In the latest episode of Workday’s Changemakers series with TechCentral, we speak to Altron Group chief operating officer Collin Govender and Workday South Africa MD Kiv Moodley about leadership and the role of technology in modern organisations.
Govender kicks off the conversation by sharing his views on the significant changes that Altron has been through in recent years. He also unpacks his new role in the organisation, and what his day-to-day role entails now.
The two men then discuss their working relationship, including Altron’s use of Workday’s software and what this has allowed the JSE-listed technology firm to achieve through its business transformation.
Moodley then unpacks how the role played by Govender at Altron fits into Workday’s philosophy around changemakers in South Africa.
Finally, Govender turns to a passion of his, and a topic he has spoken to TechCentral about on previous occasions, namely leadership and its role not only in the success of companies but also of countries. He speaks to how technology can play a role in driving meaningful organisational change.
Don’t miss a great discussion! TechCentral
Old Mutual IT executive for employee and workplace enablement Nomsa Lewisa is the guest in this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology podcast.
In the show, Lewisa – who is joined later in the discussion by Workday South Africa MD Kiv Moodley – unpacks Old Mutual’s strategic priorities and how technology is helping the company achieve its business objectives.
The podcast, the latest in a series by Workday grouped under the theme of “change makers”, explores how Old Mutual is using technology – including Workday solutions – to improve its human capital management systems.
In the interview, Lewisa discusses:
•Her role at Old Mutual and what it entails;
•The evolution of this role in the last few years, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the work-from-home mandates and the emerging world of hybrid work;
•The future of work, and how it is influencing Old Mutual’s strategy around its people and their development;
•The projects that are a top priority for Old Mutual;
•The strategic relationship between Old Mutual and Workday and what it entails; and
•What deploying Workday solutions has allowed Old Mutual to do better, including attracting and retaining scarce skills.
Moodley then joins the conversation, sharing insight into Workday, the history of the company’s relationship with Old Mutual, and the impact of technology on human resources and financial leaders in South Africa. TechCentral
Joan Joffe, the founder of Joffe Associates who would later play a pivotal role in the launch of South Africa’s mobile industry, began her IT career writing machine code on an ICL (then ICT) mainframe.
Joffe, who introduced the IBM PC to South Africa in the early 1980s (much to IBM South Africa’s chagrin), has a storied career going all the way back to the late 1950s.
Indeed, one of the first projects in which she was involved was developing the very first computerised payroll system for the SA Railways (now Transnet).
In this latest episode of the popular TCS Legends interview series, Joffe tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about her early career, what led to her striking out on her own with Joffe Associates, and how she eventually became marketing director for Vodacom during its start-up years.
What many people might not know about Joffe is that she even had a stint as a technology journalist at one point in her career, writing a column for FinanceWeek, a now-defunct business magazine.
In this episode of TCS Legends, Joffe chats about:
•Her studies at Wits University;
•Her early programming career;
•Her time in the US, where she worked for Wells Fargo Bank and Standard Oil;
•Her time as a saleswoman for HP selling pocket calculators and how that led to her securing an HP dealership and the formation of Joffe Associates;
•The launch by Joffe Associates of the IBM PC in South Africa and Joffe’s clashes with local IBM management at the time;
•The sale of Joffe Associates to Datakor, and why it was a disaster;
•The Vodacom opportunity and what was involved in lauching South Africa’s first mobile operator;
•The battle over Vodacom’s advertising agencies;
•Working with Vodacom’s founding CEO, Alan Knott-Craig;
•Meeting Nelson Mandela;
•The early skirmishes with MTN; and
•The launch of the Vodacom Foundation.
Joffe, who succeeded in a male-dominated industry, went on to become a founding member of Nozala Investments.
She has also served on the boards of various organisations, including the CSIR, Datacentrix and a number of non-profit organisations.
Among other accolades and awards, she is a recipient of the Wits University Lifetime Award for Entrepreneurship.
Don’t miss this fascinating interview with a pioneering woman in South Africa’s IT industry – and a true legend of the sector.
TCS Legends is powered by Mitel. For all your Unified Communications and Customer Experience needs, visit Mitel.com. TechCentral
The healthcare industry in South Africa is in a state of flux, not least because of the introduction of the much-derided national health insurance (NHI) law. Technology can, however, play a big role in helping address the myriad complex issues facing the sector.
That’s the view of Henry Adams, country manager at InterSystems South Africa and an expert on the healthcare industry, who was speaking recently in an interview with TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology talk show. Watch or listen to the episode below.
In the episode, Adams succinctly unpacks:
•The role played by InterSystems in the local healthcare industry, including the company’s background and focus areas;
•The lack of integration of healthcare systems in South Africa, the role of electronic medical records, and why no national health insurance scheme can possibly work without addressing interoperability;
•What impact the NHI will have on the sector;
•The role of electronic medical records and why they are key to any reform of South Africa’s healthcare industry – plus, what’s the best way of protecting these records and ensuring compliance with the Protection of Personal Information Act;
•What a fully integrated system for healthcare providers and their patients might look like and what it would take to build it;
•The guidelines and legislative support needed to bridge the gap between government and the healthcare industry; and
•The role InterSystems believes it can play in helping address some of the challenges facing South Africa’s healthcare industry.
Visit InterSystems South Africa’s website for more information – and be sure not to miss a fascinating discussion that affects all South Africans. TechCentral
A strong and reliable Wi-Fi network is no longer a perk but a fundamental necessity. Just like access to good coffee and comfortable chairs, businesses are expected to provide a seamless Wi-Fi experience for employees, guests and tenants. A frustratingly slow or spotty connection can bring your entire operation to a crawl, hindering productivity and damaging your reputation.
Wi-Fi experts at Vox
Vox understands the critical role Wi-Fi plays in a successful business and how its Wi-Fi offering can be a major differentiator. The guest today in this episode of TCS+ is Craig Blignaut, product manager for Wi-Fi at Vox. Blignaut brings a wealth of knowledge about the needs of businesses and the technology that keeps them connected.
Planning for success: proactive Wi-Fi solutions
Blignaut discussed the importance of having a well-defined Wi-Fi strategy from the very beginning: proper planning prevents problems later. Vox takes a proactive approach by using specialised software to create virtual models of your office space. This software considers building materials like brick, glass and metal, allowing it to predict how Wi-Fi signals will travel and where obstacles might cause issues.
This virtual planning isn’t just about signal strength; it also helps determine the best placement for access points and switches, as well as how to route cables in the most efficient way. It even considers factors like employee traffic patterns to optimise network performance and capacity in areas where it’s needed most.
Just like any other piece of equipment, Wi-Fi needs regular check-ups to ensure optimal performance. Vox offers a comprehensive Wi-Fi audit service that includes both on-site and remote testing. This ensures your access points are delivering the data, bandwidth and capacity you need to function smoothly. The audit also considers factors that can fluctuate over time, such as the number of users on the network, peak usage times, and even changes to your building’s structure or materials.
Staying secure
Security is another crucial aspect of any Wi-Fi network. Outdated systems are vulnerable to breaches, leaving your business data and your users’ information at risk. As Wi-Fi technology improves, so, too, should your security protocols. Vox recommends using strong encryption like WPA3 to keep your network safe from unauthorised access and data loss.
Managed Wi-Fi solutions: the power of remote support
In addition to supplying enterprise-grade equipment, Vox offers a managed Wi-Fi solution that provides off-site management and remote support. This means you have a team of experts behind the scenes, constantly monitoring your network and proactively addressing any issues that may arise. Vox’s AI-powered software can even anticipate and troubleshoot potential problems before they occur, preventing disruptions before they start.
The bottom line
Don’t settle for a sluggish, unreliable Wi-Fi network. A poor connection can frustrate employees and guests alike, hindering productivity and creating a negative impression of your business. A Vox Wi-Fi audit can identify areas for improvement and ensure you’re getting the most out of your network. Imagine a world where your employees can download large files, stream video conferences and access cloud-based applications without a hitch.
Ready to upgrade your Wi-Fi experience?
Contact Craig Blignaut at Vox or your Vox account manager to discuss your options and take your business Wi-Fi to the next level.
•Visit www.vox.co.za or e-mail info@vox.co.za
•Book a Wi-Fi survey or audit
•Guest Wi-Fi solutions from Vox
This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned TechCentral
Softline co-founder and former CEO Ivan Epstein is TechCentral’s guest in the latest episode of TCS Legends.
Epstein, who co-founded Softline in 1988 with Alan Osrin, chats to host Duarte da Silva – who also happens to have been the first guest on TCS Legends – about the early days of Softline, its listing on the JSE and its eventual sale to Sage.
It was a heady time in South Africa’s nascent IT sector, and Epstein relates interesting titbits from that time, including what was involved in the JSE listing and the eventual sale to Sage.
It’s a fascinating story, not only about a successful South African business, but also the people behind it.
TCS Legends is powered by Mitel. For all your Unified Communications and Customer Experience needs, visit Mitel.com. TechCentral
MTN South Africa last week announced that PayShap, South Africa’s rapid payments platform, is being integrated into its Mobile Money (MoMo) platform.
Bradwin Roper, chief financial services officer at MTN South Africa, is the guest in the latest episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS). He unpacks the PayShap development and what it means, and explores MTN’s fintech strategy and the future of mobile money in South Africa.
In this episode of TCS, Roper chats about:
The significance of MTN becoming the first non-banking platform to offer access to PayShap;
Why and how it’s working with Investec and technical service provider Electrum to deploy the solution;
What MTN customers will be able to do with PayShap;
The growth of mobile money in South Africa, and the work that MTN is doing to grow the ecosystem; and
* Lessons South Africa can draw from other emerging markets, notably India and Brazil, in mobile money and rapid payments.
Don’t miss the interview! TechCentral
David Frankel played a pioneering role in the commercial development of the internet in South Africa as co-founder and CEO of Internet Solutions.
Since then, he’s gone on to a successful investing career in the US, where he is co-founder and managing partner at Boston- and New York-based Founder Collective, a seed-stage venture capital fund whose successful investments have included Uber Technologies, Brontes (sold to 3M) and PillPack (sold to Amazon).
Frankel, widely regarded as one of the most successful entrepreneurs to come out of South Africa’s technology industry, joins TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod on TCS Legends to chat about:
•His career, and how the Internet Solutions opportunity came about;
•What it was like in the early days of the internet in South Africa;
•The fight he led, with Mark Todes, against Telkom’s attempts in the 1990s to monopolise the internet industry – and how the industry won the battle;
•The cast of characters at Internet Solutions, including brothers Ronnie and Alon Apteker, that made it a special place to be at the time;
•Whether he was really offered the job of CEO of Dimension Data;
•His studies at Harvard Business School;
•The creation of Founders Collective, and why Boston is a great place for a tech-focused venture capitalist to be; and
•His views on South Africa in 2024 and his continued connection to the country.
Don’t miss this insightful interview with one of South Africa’s leading entrepreneurs, exploring the role he played in the heady days of the internet in South Africa and what it took to build a successful investment career in the US.
We apologise for the audio quality issues in this episode. TechCentral
In this special episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS) – presented by MTN Business – Duncan McLeod chats to two South African biohackers, Daniel de Kock and Jarryd Bekker, about why they have voluntarily installed microchips in their bodies.
Respectively the chief technology officer and CEO of Riot Network – the wireless broadband specialist that is building low-cost networks in underserviced areas, including Olievenhoutbosch in Gauteng – they tell TechCentral about why they chose to implant the chips and what they’re used for.
The pair, who both profess a desire to receive brain implants from Elon Musk’s Neuralink, explain how they started augmenting their biological bodies with electronics, what’s involved, the information they’re able to glean from the chips, and where the fusion of human biology and electronics is headed over the coming decade.
In the interview, Bekker and De Kock unpack how electronic circuitry in the human body can help detect and manage serious health issues, and the impact this could have on fighting disease and prolonging people’s lives.
The two discuss a range of issues related to biohacking, including:
•What’s involved when it’s time to upgrade the chips;
•How one goes about having them installed;
•The growing online biohacker community;
•Integration with artificial intelligence; and
•Much more.
Don’t miss this offbeat but fascinating discussion! TechCentral
From the internet of things (IoT) to private 5G networks, MTN Group has a lot to offer public sector organisations, according to David Behr, CEO of MTN Converged Solutions.
Behr, a stalwart of the local ICT industry and a recent recruit to MTN, tells TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology show about the solutions that MTN Business offers its government clients, including smart government solutions, IoT (for example, for smart metering) and private 5G (which has strong applications in areas such as healthcare and education).
Although some government processes have been automated successfully and improved using technology, many areas of the public sector are still quite manual and paper-based, and modern technologies offer an opportunity to reduce administrative overheads and improve service quality for South African citizens, Behr explains in the interview.
In this episode of TCS+, Behr unpacks:
•The state of spending on ICT solutions in South Africa’s public sector, and where spending should be directed;
•What further role technology can play in improving government’s work and the effective management of government services;
•The role of private 5G networks in the public sector;
•The state of cybersecurity in government and what more can be done to protect public sector systems from attack; and
•The public sector opportunity in the rest of Africa.
If you work in the public sector, be sure not to miss this important conversation. TechCentral
TechCentral is thrilled to bring you an interview with Mike Lawrie, a pioneering figure at Rhodes University who helped bring e-mail and later the internet to South Africa.
In this episode of TCS Legends – the podcast series that features interviews with (and about) some of the leading figures who helped shape South Africa’s technology sector into what it is today – TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod sat down with Lawrie to chat about the ground-breaking work that happened at Rhodes University in the early days of the internet.
In this episode, Lawrie shares wonderful anecdotes about that time at Rhodes, and why the Eastern Cape university was able to achieve things its bigger rivals in the cities couldn’t – or wouldn’t – during the height of apartheid.
Lawrie remembers many of his colleagues at Rhodes at the time, and the role they played in connecting South African universities to e-mail, and later to the internet.
Episodes 1 and 2 of TCS Legends featured well-known investor and businessman Duarte da Silva, who reminisced about some of the business leaders that helped build South Africa’s tech industry. Episode 3, featuring Hein Engelbrecht and Carlos Vizcarra, turned the focus to the late Mustek founder David Kan.
TCS Legends is a by-invitation-only, editorially driven tech show that builds on TechCentral’s credible, market-leading podcast productions.
TCS Legends is powered by Mitel. For all your unified communications and customer experience needs, visit Mitel.com. TechCentral
Paratus Group is rapidly emerging as a major player in the telecommunications industry in Southern Africa. But who’s behind Paratus, and what’s its history?
From landing Google’s Equiano subsea cable in Swakopmund and building a new fibre route between South Africa and Namibia – providing a new data corridor between Gauteng and the world – to working with Meta Platforms to wire up Zambia and building expansive satellite ground stations, the Namibian-born group has its eyes firmly set on becoming a significant telecoms player in the region.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod chats to Paratus Group chief commercial officer Martin Cox about the company’s origins (although founded in Namibia, it cut its teeth in Angola), its current footprint and its future growth plans.
Among other topics, Cox discusses:
•The impact of the recent subsea cable breaks in West Africa and the role of diverse routes in reducing the impact;
•Paratus’s new fibre route from Swakopmund to Johannesburg, which runs through Botswana – its significance and what was involved in its construction;
•The group’s footprint in South Africa, including its new satellite ground station in Irene, near Pretoria; and
•Paratus’s culture, and why its management team is happiest in “the trenches”; and
•Whether a listing for Paratus Group could be on the cards at some point (its Namibian operation is already listed in Windhoek).
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
A dusty township in Gauteng is the site of a South African-developed mesh network that could change everything. Read the full story at https://techcentral.co.za/internet-revolution-in-olievenhoutbosch/241698/ TechCentral
David Kan, the late founder and former CEO of Mustek, is the focus of episode 3 of TechCentral’s new podcast series, TCS Legends – powered by Mitel.
In this episode, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod is joined by Mustek CEO Hein Engelbrecht and Carlos Vizcarra, CEO of CPS Technologies, who was close friends with Kan for decades, for a wide-ranging discussion on the man’s life and achievements.
Kan founded Mustek in 1987 as a technology importer and distributor, and the company quickly became known for its locally manufactured line of Mecer PCs. Today it’s one of the country’s biggest technology distributors, and is listed on the JSE.
Kan, who passed away in 2022 at just 62, was born in Taipei. He worked various menial jobs in his native Taiwan, including as a dishwasher, truck driver and removal company worker.
After matriculating, he left to study mechanical engineering in the US at Pittsburg State University. In 1986, he moved to South Africa where his father was working a Taiwanese diplomat. He worked for a time at a cutlery manufacturing company before attending his first PC expo in Johannesburg.
It was there that he met the MD of a Taiwanese company called Mustek Corporation. The MD of that company, Owen Chen, wanted to set up a warehouse in South Africa – Mustek in South Africa was born. He went on to establish one of the first PC assembly lines in South Africa.
In this episode of TCS Legends, Engelbrecht – who joined Mustek in 1997 as group fin0ancial manager – and Vizcarra, with whom Kan formed a business relationship in the early days of Mustek, pay tribute to Kan, and share personal anecdotes about the man and his life.
Vizcarra discusses the origins of Mustek, the early days of the PC industry and touches on the development of the Springbok, a South African-built clone PC brand that predated Mustek’s Mecer line.
In the interview, you’ll hear about:
•Mustek’s early days building PCs in Garankuwa and why local assembly made sense in the era of sanctions;
•How Kan and Vizcarra became close friends, despite competing with each other in business;
•How Engelbrecht met Kan, and his first impressions of the man;
•Vizcarra and Engelbrecht’s favourite memories of Kan;
•What drove Kan, a foreigner to South Africa, to business success – and how he became to embrace his adopted country; and
•What he was like to work for;
This episode of TCS Legends includes special bonus content: a full audio interview that TechCentral had with Kan in June 2017.
Don’t miss the episode!
TCS Legends is powered by Mitel. For all your Unified Communications and Customer Experience needs, visit Mitel.com. TechCentral
Data and identity governance should be a top-of-mind issue for business leaders in 2024.
CYBER1 Solutions MD Jayson O’Reilly and senior cybersecurity architect Christiaan Swanepoel share their insights on this important topic in this episode of TechCentral’s business technology show, TCS+.
They kick off the discussion with a definition of the topic, and why it’s critically important that companies get data and identity governance right in a world of significantly heightened cyber risk.
It’s by no means a new focus area – indeed, many organisations have been trying to solve this for years, decades even, showing just how difficult it is to get right.
O’Reilly and Swanepoel discuss how the threat landscape has evolved over time, and the risks organisations face if they overlook data governance protocols.
In this TCS+ episode, they also tackle these key questions:
•What are examples of the tangible consequences of disregarding data governance and the direct implications for personal security?
•Identity has been a focus for many organisations for the past 10 years or longer, so why does it remain a problem to be solved and what are the roadblocks in getting it done right?
•How does the mishandling of personal information compromise privacy?
•In what ways do emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and the internet of things complicate Identity governance efforts.
•What is the impact of legislation such as South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, and what’s next on the horizon from a regulatory perspective?
Don’t miss discussion on a topic of critical importance to modern, data-driven organisations.
About CYBER1 Solutions
CYBER1 Solutions is a cybersecurity specialist operating in Southern Africa, East and West Africa, Dubai, and Europe. Its solutions deliver information security; IT risk management; fraud detection; governance and compliance; and a full range of managed services. It also provides bespoke security services across the spectrum, with a portfolio that ranges from the formulation of its customers’ security strategies to the daily operation of end-point security solutions. To do this, it partners with world-leading security vendors to deliver cutting-edge technologies augmented by its wide range of professional services.
Its services enable organisations in every sector to prevent attacks by providing the visibility into vulnerabilities they need to detect compromises rapidly, respond to breaches and stop attacks before they become an issue. Visit www.c1-s.com for more. TechCentral
Vinolia Singh, chief people officer at JSE-listed workplace solutions provider Adcorp, joins the second episode of a series of interviews about enterprise cloud software provider Workday.
In this TCS+ interview, grouped under the theme of “change makers”, Singh is joined by Kiv Moodley, MD of Workday South Africa, to unpack how the nature of work is changing, especially following the end of the Covid pandemic, but also as a new generation –with very different ideas about the nature of work – joins the workforce.
In the conversation, Singh unpacks several of the trends impacting the future – and nature – of work, and how these trends are affecting Adcorp, and how her role as chief people officer is evolving.
“The world of work has become boundaryless. We have to become more flexible,” she says of employers. “Companies need to become more innovation to acquire the skills they need.”
Singh and Moodley tackle key themes around this topic, including:
•How technology is enabling Adcorp’s business objectives;
•How Workday’s solutions have allowed Adcorp to deal with challenges such as the skills shortage in South Africa;
•The reception to these solutions among Adcorp employees; and
•How the technology has allowed Adcorp to adapt to a rapidly shifting environment;
Don’t miss this insightful interview on the future of work and the role of technology in managing change. TechCentral
Persetel’s Roux Marnitz, Altron’s Bill Venter, Vodacom’s Alan Knott-Craig and Datatec’s Jens Montanana are all undisputed business legends in South Africa’s ICT industry.
The four – all now retired except for Datatec CEO Montanana – are the subject of episode 2 of TechCentral’s new fortnightly technology show, TCS Legends.
This episode, the second part of an opening double header, features insights from investing legend Duarte da Silva about the four businessmen who had an outsized impact of the technology sector in South Africa.
The show, the latest from TechCentral — the home of real technology journalism in South Africa –showcases people who achieved great things in (and for) the local tech sector.
In episode 1 of TCS Legends, Da Silva – a well-known industry figure who was once the country’s top IT analyst (at Merrill Lynch) and who founded Macquarie First South – unpacked the Dimension Data story, with a focus on former CEO Jeremy Ord. Find that episode at techcentral.co.za. TechCentral
Protecting sensitive company information through data loss prevention (DLP) tools has become paramount for many organisations. But doing so without impacting employee productivity can be a big challenge.
In this episode of TCS+, Next DLP executives Chris Denbigh-White (chief security officer) and Fallon Steyn (regional sales manager, South Africa) are joined by their customer, LRMG, to discuss this crucial topic in greater detail.
LRMG’s information security officer, Nadia Veeran-Patel, unpacks how the company has used Next DLP’s technology to secure its data while ensuring workflows aren’t impacted and productivity isn’t affected.
In the episode, Veeran-Patel kicks off the discussion with an overview of LRMG’s areas of focus and why they decided to engage the services of Next DLP.
Denbigh-White and Steyn discuss the critical challenge of how best to harmonise user-satisfaction with securing sensitive company data, all without compromising operational efficiency. Steyn delves into a recently published piece on how Next DLP’s Reveal platform helps chief information security officers focus on their priority areas: visibility to risk, information governance and auditability.
The conversation rounds off with a discussion on the positive changes LRMG has seen since implementing its information rights management programme with Next DLP and how employees have responded to the changes.
If you’re in any way involved in securing your company’s data, don’t miss this important and insightful discussion. TechCentral
South Africa has a new data consultancy. Called Calybre, it’s headed by CEO Alexa Bisschops and is positioned as “the best partner for any company’s data people”.
Bisschops joins TechCentral’s TCS+ show to chat about the launch of the company, its co-founders and their backgrounds, and why the company believes the market is ripe for the launch of a “next-generation consultancy”.
In the interview, Bisschops unpacks:
•The background to Calybre and its market positioning;
•What a next-generation consulting company does exactly, and what makes it different to traditional technology consulting firms;
•The plans for Calybre’s growth in 2024 and beyond;
•How Calybre works with technology companies;
•What a typical client engagement looks like;
•The impact of artificial intelligence in the consulting space; and
•Much more besides.
Don’t miss this insightful discussion about an exciting new player in the local – and global – data consultancy market. TechCentral
Well-known investor and businessman Duarte da Silva joins TCS Legends to discuss Jeremy Ord, Roux Marnitz, Alan Knott-Craig, Jens Montanana and Bill Venter.
Well-known investor and businessman Duarte da Silva is the guest in the inaugural episode of TechCentral’s TCS Legends, a new video podcast series focused on legendary figures who helped shape South Africa’s technology industry.
A two-part scene setter for the rest of the limited series, Da Silva – who knows many of the individuals who built businesses in the country’s tech space after 1994 – shares his insights into the (often colourful) characters who helped define the country’s ICT sector into what it is today.
TCS Legends, which is powered by Mitel, has a great line-up of guests secured over the coming months.
But in episode 1 – the first of a double header with Da Silva – we delve into the people, the deals and sometimes the scandal that helped define an industry.
Da Silva, an avid investor who serves on a number of company boards, is a former director of Merrill Lynch – where his hefty analyst reports on JSE-listed tech companies in the 1990s had company CEOs lapping up his insights, and more than a little fearful about what he might write about them. He also founded Macquarie First South, among other enterprising ventures, and possesses encyclopaedic knowledge of business in South Africa.
A legend in his own right, Da Silva shares often-amusing tales of deals (some of which went horribly wrong), corporate shenanigans and plenty more besides with TCS Legends.
In the show, he chats about many people and companies, but the primary focus is on five individuals:
•Jeremy Ord at Dimension Data (now NTT Data)
•Roux Marnitz at Persetel (now BCX)
•Bill Venter at Altron
•Jens Montanana at Datatec
•Alan Knott-Craig at Vodacom
The show is hosted by TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, who said of the interview with Da Silva: “If you are, or have ever been, involved in South Africa’s IT industry, this is one show you simply do not want to miss!”
Part 2 of the interview with Da Silva will be published on Monday, 4 March 2024. TechCentral
South African firm Hydrox Holdings has developed a new way of extracting hydrogen for use in cars and other applications that it believes will help usher in a new era of plentiful clean energy for the world.
The company, based in Pretoria, has won a number of awards and other accolades for its patented intellectual property, which involves extracting hydrogen from water using a "membrane-less" electrolyser technology that it has developed and now patented globally.
Corrie de Jager, the CEO and founder of Hydrox Holdings, joins the TechCentral Show to chat about the progress the company has made in recent years in developing the technology - and why he is now looking for investors to help commercialise it.
De Jager, who has been working on the technology for more than two decades, claims the technology could help move the world to non-polluting and mass-scale hydrogen fuel cell-powered cars more quickly by dramatically reducing the cost of producing hydrogen gas from water.
In this episode of TCS, he unpacks:
Where the idea to build a membrane-less electrolyser came from;
The proofs of concept the company has launched;
The hurdles that Hydrox's team has had to overcome while developing the technology;
The cost and production advantages of membrane-less electrolysers;
Why hydrogen could be the next big thing in the field of energy;
What's stopping the widespread adoption of hydrogen fuel cell-powered cars; and
* Where Hydrox plans to take the technology and how it intends to commercialise it.
Don't miss a fascinating interview about a potentially ground-breaking South African innovation. TechCentral
TechCentral, the publisher of South Africa’s leading business technology podcasts, is thrilled to announce the launch of TCS Legends.
The new show will feature interviews with (and about) some of the leading figures who helped shape South Africa’s technology industry into what it is today.
As the show’s name implies, we’ll be interviewing leading figures who achieved great things in – and for – the tech sector in South Africa.
From PCs to IT services and software to telecoms, TCS Legends features some of the leading figures in the industry over the last 30 years.
With season 1 launching later in February, TCS Legends is a by-invitation-only, editorially driven tech show that builds on TechCentral’s credible, market-leading multimedia productions, including the TechCentral Show (TCS) and TCS+.
TCS Legends is powered by Mitel. For all your unified communications and customer experience needs, visit Mitel.com. TechCentral
Big changes are coming to the way companies build and manage their network infrastructure.
This is a key discussion point in the latest episode of TechCentral’s TCS+ technology show, featuring subject matter experts from Dimension Data – soon to be NTT Data – and Cisco.
NTT’s 2022/2023 Global Network Report found that 70% of CEOs surveyed indicated that a lack of network maturity was negatively impacting business delivery. But what’s the solution?
To unpack that question in some detail, TCS+ spoke to four experts in the field:
•Prashil Gareeb, vice president of MNCS, Dimension Data;
•Paul Mende, director of managed networking product management, Dimension Data;
•Adesh Baboolal, acting client partner director: managed services, NTT South Africa; and
•Aadil Hassim, sales specialist for enterprise networking and software, Cisco South Africa.
Gareeb kicks off the discussion on the brand changes taking place at Dimension Data – including the renaming of the company – and what they mean for the business and its clients. He also unpacks the longstanding relationship between both Cisco and Dimension Data and Cisco and the NTT Group.
The panellists then unpack:
•Why many companies have failed to pay sufficient attention to networking. Why is it important to get networking right in the modern cloud era? And what role does this play in digital transformation initiatives?
•The advances in wireless networking compared to traditional cabled networks;
•How Dimension Data – soon, NTT Data – can help companies with their network modernisation efforts, including a look at what Dimension Data offers the market in terms of managed network services through the NTT Spektra solution;
•The relationship the Cisco and how the organisations are working together to solve customers’ problems;
•The advantages – and potential pitfalls – of a network modernisation project, including a look the security considerations; and
•The benefits of outsourcing network management.
Don’t miss this insightful discussion! TechCentral
Andile Ngcaba’s Convergence Partners last week announced it was buying storied South African IT services group Datacentrix from Alviva Holdings for an undisclosed sum.
Datacentrix’s long-serving CEO, Ahmed Mahomed, joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to discuss the acquisition, how it happened, why Alviva decided to sell and what the future holds for the company.
In the show, Mahomed unpacks:
•Datacentrix’s history, when it was founded, its JSE listing and the acquisition by Alviva;
•The business’s key focus areas today;
•What the Convergence Partners deal means for the future of Datacentrix;
•How Datacentrix will work with Ngcaba; and
•Whether the company might head back to the JSE at some point.
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
As South Africa experiences tough economic times, employers and workforces alike can benefit from solutions like telemedicine. In a nutshell, telemedicine is the remote diagnosis and treatment of patients by using ICT. This allows an individual to seek a doctor’s advice about non-emergency situations that don’t require an in-person visit.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, Guardian Eye AVA specialist Justine Pillay chats to host Brendan Haskins about this powerful new combination of technology and telemedicine that is set to shake up the way primary healthcare is handled in South Africa.
The solution by Guardian Eye, dubbed “AVA”, is an innovative asynchronous internet-of-things medical device and telemedicine platform that is set to bring positive change to the local healthcare industry.
According to Pillay, the AVA medical device, powered by IoT, is bridging a gap in the workplace by improving access to care, cutting costs and boosting efficiency in healthcare delivery for everyone involved. The offering is aimed at companies with more than 150 employees and is a first-to-market in Africa.
Collecting vital data
The AVA Guardian Eye link features remote monitoring of patients by gathering and saving all historical medical data and images, and other forms of communication, allowing healthcare providers to deliver care outside traditional in-person visits.
In addition, by using the "Higo Pro” connected e-health care product, AVA can be used to collect vital data from an employee who is feeling unwell. These vitals are then sent to an online healthcare professional to make an initial assessment – generally within a waiting period of only 30 minutes.
All medical exams are carried out by a nurse or a trained AVA “champion operator”, with data sent to a qualified doctor for a final diagnosis.
If warranted, the doctor will give the employee a prescription for medication and a sick note they can send to the HR department.
Benefits for all
In this way, AVA saves the employee time by reducing travel and waiting-room times. They can also save money by receiving this unlimited access to a healthcare provider as a work-sponsored benefit, rather than having to pay for their doctors when needed.
For employers, Guardian Eye’s AVA can keep digital healthcare records for all members of staff, and increase motivation and morale through the provision of a quality employer benefit. Productivity is also increased, and sick leave is reduced through the provision of onsite telemedicine.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion. TechCentral
Kena Health took top honours at the recent MTN Business App of the Year Awards. Its chief technology officer, Pheello Maboea, tells the TechCentral Show (TCS) about the telehealth start-up’s journey so far.
Founded by Saul Kornik in 2021, Kena Health aims to improve the reach of quality healthcare services by digitising access to primary healthcare professionals.
The TCS interview, hosted by TechCentral’s Nkosinathi Ndlovu, delves into:
•Barriers to telehealth adoption in South Africa and how new entrants are legitimising the industry;
•The challenges of designing applications for two very distinct audiences – highly technical medical staff on one hand and vulnerable patients on the other;
•How the company approaches talent retention and recruitment in what can be described as a seller’s market for technical skills;
•How emergent technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence are going to disrupt healthcare provision; and
•What winning the MTN Business App of the Year means for the start-up.
Don’t miss a fascinating conversation on the future of healthcare. TechCentral
As we approach 2024, KnowBe4’s content strategy vice president Anna Collard joins TechCentral’s TCS+ show to unpack reflections drawn from the world’s leading security events, as well as dialogues with industry leaders, academics and government representatives. TechCentral
There has been considerable noise about the launch – or otherwise – of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service in South Africa, much of it conjecture. What’s the real story?
To unpack what exactly is required of SpaceX-launched Starlink to launch in South Africa – including the rules around black economic empowerment (BEE) – the TechCentral Show spoke to Dominic Cull, a legal expert on the subject.
Cull, who serves as the regulatory adviser to the Internet Service Providers’ Association (Ispa), shares some surprising insights into the process.
Topics tackled by Cull in the discussion include:
•Who is really to blame for Starlink’s failure to launch in South Africa so far;
•What the law really says about BEE and the issuing of telecommunications licences?
•What Icasa’s licensing regime looks like, and which licence types Starlink needs to apply for to launch its services in South Africa.
•Why there is an artificial restriction on the issuing of new licences – and why this makes no sense anymore.
•How Icasa’s “type approvals” for communications equipment work and what they’re for.
•Why Ispa members are keen to work with Starlink.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion that clears up some of the misconceptions in the market about Starlink in South Africa. TechCentral
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, author, marketer and consultant GG Alcock chats to Nkosinathi Ndlovu about how South Africa’s informal economy is being digitised.
Alcock’s background as a white boy growing up in rural Msinga, KwaZulu-Natal has helped him develop a deep cultural understanding of township life and the way business is conducted there.
Indeed, he has built his career as a marketer and consultant based on his intimate understanding of the township economies.
In the show, Alcock shares some of his personal history, speaks about his earliest innovations and gives detailed insight into how the adoption of digital technologies has progressed in South Africa’s informal economy in recent years.
The conversation delves into:
•How the Covid-19 pandemic influenced the adoption of digital payments in the informal economy;
•Why card payments are outpacing banking apps, third-party payment platforms like Zapper and even PayShap in townships;
•Data-driven insights about what informal business owners really think about ditching cash for digital; and
•The outlook for digitisation and payments in the informal economy.
Don’t miss a fascinating conversation! TechCentral
TechCentral reported on Friday that South African cryptocurrency platforms Revix and BitFund are joining forces and, together with Austria’s Coinpanion, have formed a new alternative investment platform called Altify.
Revix founder and now Altify CEO Sean Sanders joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show to unpack the merger, how it came about, and what Altify hopes to do in the alternative investment space not only in South Africa but the broader Europe, Middle East and Africa region.
In its new form, Altify will continue to offer the crypto investment products that Revix, Coinpanion and BitFund became known for, including a wide selection of ETF-style crypto bundles, along with other alternative finance products.
He said the recent downturn in the crypto market acted as a catalyst for the merger and accelerated Altify’s expansion into non-crypto investment options.
According to Sanders, these market dynamics have also primed the environment for consolidation among retail investment platforms, especially in the crypto space. “Altify is leaning into these opportunities and is engaging with other investment platforms in the UAE, the UK and Europe who could join Altify over the coming months.”
Don’t miss the interview! TechCentral
Joseph Byrne, principal solutions engineer at OneTrust, knows a lot about the topic of risk management.
He joins Duncan McLeod on TechCentral’s business technology podcast, TCS+, to unpack the topic in greater detail and to discuss what it means for South African organisations.
Byrne kicks off the discussion with an overview of OneTrust. Founded in 2016 by Kabir Barday, the privately held company has more than 12 000 customers around the world, including in South Africa.
In the interview, Byrne unpacks:
The differences between third-party risk management and privacy risk.
How organisations can go about evaluating and selecting third-party service providers and tools to minimise privacy risk.
Which laws and regulations organisations should companies pay attention to. There are a lot of them, and organisations need to know which ones are important to them, says Byrne.
How organisations can ensure that third-party relationships are properly documented and regularly reviewed and that they are compliant with privacy regulations.
Whether there is scope for automation in this field.
What should happen when things go wrong.
* The role of artificial intelligence in privacy risk management – is AI technology mature enough yet to be genuinely useful, and are new rules needed to deal with it?
Don’t miss an insightful conversation about a critical issue faced not only by South African organisations but companies around the world. TechCentral
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, Jaydev Chiba engages in a comprehensive discussion with Marcell Otto, digital services product manager for Ricoh South Africa, shedding light on Ricoh’s pivotal role in today’s digital ecosystems, particularly in the realm of governance, risk and compliance (GRC).
The conversation delves into the dynamic landscape of global and local cybersecurity challenges, drawing attention to recent incidents such as cybersecurity breaches, which exemplify the pervasive and evolving nature of cyber threats.
The dialogue unfolds with an exploration of the multifaceted consequences of cybercrime, ranging from substantial financial losses to irreparable reputational damage and intricate compliance issues. Otto underscores the intricate challenges organisations encounter in fortifying their defences against cyber threats. A focus on the aftermath of cyberattacks reveals the protracted timelines and considerable costs associated with recovery, offering a sobering perspective on the stakes involved.
Otto then delves into the significance of compliance with frameworks such as King 4, emphasising the responsibility organisations bear in managing and safeguarding customer data. The discussion briefly touches upon Ricoh’s digital services pillars, positioning the company as a forward-looking provider tailored for the demands of the future workplace.
Ricoh's six digital services pillars play a crucial role in shaping its strategic approach to the evolving digital landscape. These pillars include:
1.Digital workspace: Focused on the transformation of the future workplace.
2.Business process management: Streamlining and enhancing organizational processes.
3.Digital experience: Providing enriched and seamless digital experiences.
4.Graphic communications: Addressing the evolving needs of graphic and visual communication.
5.Cybersecurity: Offering robust solutions to safeguard against cyber threats.
6.Cloud and infrastructure services: Providing essential services to support cloud infrastructure.
A spotlight is then cast on Ricoh's cybersecurity product, RansomCare, a groundbreaking solution designed to proactively mitigate the impact of ransomware threats in real time. Otto elaborates its distinctive approach, which focuses on the swift detection and interruption of malicious encryption, showcasing its efficacy in preventing cybersecurity incidents.
As the conversation concludes, Otto extends a call to action for organisations to seek expert guidance in navigating the intricate terrain of cybersecurity. He underscores the significance of proactive measures and collaborative efforts, framing the imperative to secure digital ecosystems as a collective responsibility for the betterment of society. In essence, the discussion provides a comprehensive and insightful exploration of Ricoh’s strategic positioning in the digital landscape, its commitment to cybersecurity, and the broader implications for businesses operating in an increasingly complex and interconnected environment. TechCentral
Companies may be surprised to learn that the profile of the typical cybercriminal in 2023 does not match the stereotype of tech-savvy youngsters in hoodies.
Rather, modern cybercriminals are often employed by criminal syndicates and even keep office hours, according to Armand Kruger, head of cybersecurity at NEC XON, who has gone toe to toe – or is that keyboard to keyboard? – with cyber adversaries.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+ technology show, Kruger discusses:
•NEC XON and its portfolio of solutions;
•The company’s experience in dealing with security breaches and other cyber incidents;
•How cybercriminals operate and why, including the tactics they use;
•How this type of activity has become embedded in organised crime;
•What businesses can do to protect themselves against ransomware attacks;
•How companies should react when they have identified a possible breach;
•What security solutions are instrumental to disrupting these adversaries; and
•What more the IT industry and the government could be doing to help stop the ransomware scourge.
Don’t miss an important and fascinating discussion. TechCentral
Aidan Johnson, appointed by Massmart to lead on-demand delivery platform OneCart, believes South Africa is on the cusp of huge growth in online shopping – and that everything is to play for.
Johnson, who joins Duncan McLeod on this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), talks about the OneCart business, why Massmart bought it and where it’s headed.
The conversation delves into:
•Why OneCart works with third-party retailers that compete with Walmart-owned Massmart, the parent of brands such as Makro, Builders and Game;
•How OneCart fits into Massmart’s overarching e-commerce strategy for South Africa;
•The state of the e-commerce market in South Africa, including the on-demand segment, and the impact that Covid has had on its development;
•With the launch of Amazon.com’s retail marketplace operators in South Africa looming large, the impact this will have on the local retail industry – are local retailers ready to take on the global e-commerce giant?;
•The outlook for e-commerce growth in South Africa for the rest of the 2020s and what needs to be overcome for online sales as a percentage of total retail sales to reach 15%, from 5% now.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion about online shopping in South Africa and how local retailers – including Massmart and OneCart – are preparing for significant disruption to the retail sector in the years ahead. TechCentral
ShotSpotter, a technology that “listens” for gunshots to help law enforcement authorities pinpoint potential criminal activity, has been deployed in high-crime parts of Cape Town for some years.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), Duncan McLeod chat to Tom Chittum, senior vice president for forensic services at SoundThinking, the company that owns the acoustic gunshot detection technology, to learn about how it’s being deployed not only in South Africa but in cities around the world.
In the interview, Chittum chats about:
•How ShotSpotter is being used in Cape Town;
•How the technology works – its advantages and drawbacks;
•How law enforcement agencies use ShotSpotter to fight crime; and
•How ShotSpotter is being used in US cities to tackle gun violence.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion. TechCentral
A robust security operations centre (SOC) that is well run and equipped with the latest technologies and expertise can help bolster the security posture of any organisation.
CYBER1 executives Simon Perry and Gerald Naude tell TechCentral’s TCS+ technology show about the investment and what it means for businesses.
Perry, who is chief technology officer at CYBER1, kicks off the discussion with a definition of an SOC, what they do and why they are increasingly important in the business landscape.
Naude, who heads the SOC, then talks about why the SOC-as-a-service model is gaining traction.
Topics covered in the interview include:
·What customers are looking for in an SOC;
·Why SOCs should go beyond detection and response and into the realm of consultancy;
·The scale of CYBER1 SOC, what it offers clients and what sets it apart from other SOCs;
·How CYBER1 SOC stays current with its security knowledge – an imperative in responding to constantly evolving and emerging threats;
·How the SOC will serve customers not only in South Africa but around the world;
·The challenge of finding the right skills to staff an SOC;
·The compliance issues associated with operating an SOC;
·Why CYBER1 SOC went through the effort of ensuring it is ISO 270001 compliant and what is involved; and
·CYBER1’s white-labelled SOC solutions.
CYBER1 SOC offers ongoing monitoring of advanced threats across endpoints, networks, cloud environments and applications. Its services detect emerging, evolving and established threats through the latest threat intelligence and hunting. The SOC offers nimble detection and proactive response, delivering state-of-the-art automation and continuous business improvement.
Visit c1soc.com for more and don’t miss a great conversation on the latest in the world of information security management. TechCentral
In this episode of TCS+, TechCentral speaks to Jason Oehley and Andre den Hond, both with Arctic Wolf, to unpack the security posture of businesses in South Africa, and to learn more about what Arctic Wolf has to offer.
Over the course of his career, Oehley has worked at many tech companies, including Splunk, Dell and F5, and for over a year now has been overseeing the Arctic Wolf business in South Africa. Den Hond is Arctic Wolf's sales engineer and joined around the same time.
Arctic Wolf is a global security business founded in the US more than 12 years ago. Over the last three years, it has expanded its presence across Europe, the Middle East and Africa – including South Africa.
South Africa’s security challenges are not unique, but local businesses do face challenges around skills and budget that expose them to a lot of risk.
Arctic Wolf has a unique set of security-focused offerings that essentially plug into an organisation’s existing security tools and investments, augmenting their capabilities by providing 24/7 SOC (security operations centre) services to manage, detect and respond to threats in the business environment.
For smaller organisations that don’t have the budget or staff to run a security team, Arctic Wolf can provide that as a service.
In the discussion, Oehley shares his thoughts on why South Africa is among the top five countries globally targeted by cybercriminals. The attacks the country’s faces are highly sophisticated; standard tools are inadequate when it comes to defending against evolving threats and attack vectors. In fact, he says some 80% of South African companies don’t even have a security team in place.
The conversation turns to cyber insurance, and here it’s interesting to note that South African insurance companies are more advanced when it comes to what they require for a customer to be covered, compared to insurers in other countries.
This means local businesses must deploy a more comprehensive stack of tools to get the insurance coverage they need, and Arctic Wolf can assist businesses with this. Having the capabilities to defend from attacks is still better than depending on insurance alone, and the more enhanced a company’s security capabilities, the lower the premiums they will enjoy.
Arctic Wolf is a channel-only business and relies on partner relationships to get its services to market. However, services are delivered directly to the end customer, with the partner involved to assist in improving the customer’s (and the partner’s) security posture.
The success of the platform has largely been because of its model, where bills are issued per device and not based on data received. By not limiting the data that is allowed to be monitored, Arctic Wolf is able to scrape far more data and assess many more threats.
This is all tied together by Arctic Wolf’s Concierge Security Team, or CST. This service gives every client access to two named resources whose role is to work strategically with clients to build out and manage their security road map and engage in activities that help to constantly improve their security posture.
Perhaps the most powerful part of the offering is that Arctic Wolf plugs into every layer of an organisation’s security. This provides a total overview of the organisation’s security, 24/7, and the CST works with this data to ensure every security hole is plugged.
Oehley and Den Hood discuss how even with all these capabilities, it’s still possible for a customer to be breached, and part of the service includes incident response that is geared to helping the customer manage the aftermath, mitigate what they can, and assist the business with the implementation of recovery plans.
There’s plenty more in this important discussion – don’t miss it! TechCentral
Fast-expanding Nasdaq-listed enterprise cloud software specialist Workday has big plans for its South African unit.
In this episode of TCS+, Workday South Africa MD Kiv Moodley tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about Workday, its history and its areas of focus, and how the company works with clients, including those in South Africa.
In the first of a series of six TCS+ interviews with Workday under the theme “change makers”, Moodley discusses:
•His background, and what brought him to the Workday role;
•Workday’s history – the company was co-founded by David Duffield, the entrepreneur behind software pioneer PeopleSoft;
•How Workday got its start in South Africa and what its client profile looks like today, including the industries it focuses on – and why it won’t go after public sector business;
•The value Workday offers its clients and how it differs from other enterprise software vendors;
•The future of Workday in South Africa; and
•South Africa’s leadership challenges and how to turn them around.
Don’t miss an informative discussion! TechCentral
Secure access service edge, or SASE – pronounced “sassy”, this emerging network security concept, first described four years ago by Gartner, has huge benefits for organisations, provided it’s done right.
To discuss what SASE is and how South African organisations can take advantage of it, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod is joined on the TCS+ technology show by leading experts on the topic from Dimension Data and Palo Alto Networks.
Dimension Data’s Padma Naidoo, head of the company’s security practice, is joined by her colleague, Laudec McCarthy, a senior security solutions architect at Dimension Data in the Middle East Africa, as well as Ross Templeton, a system engineering manager at Palo Alto Networks in sub-Saharan Africa.
The three experts tackle a range of topics around SASE, including:
•The relationship between Dimension Data (soon to be NTT Data) and Palo Alto Networks.
•What SASE is exactly, and why organisations should be taking it seriously.
•The concept of zero-trust security and the role it plays in the SASE model.
•What is involved in deploying SASE technology – what companies should expect on the journey.
•The complexities and challenges involved in a SASE deployment.
•Dimension Data’s solutions in the SASE space.
•Palo Alto’s Prisma solution – what it is and how companies can use it.
•How companies should go about evaluating the SASE options available to them. And what should they be considering when selecting a managed network services partner?
There’s a ton of valuable information in this episode of TCS+. If you organisation is considering a SASE project, or even you are simply curious about what can be achieved using the SASE model, don’t miss this discussion! TechCentral
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, Fortinet’s Matthew Taljaard, subject matter expert in operational technology (OT) for Africa at Fortinet, demystifies OT, explaining what it is, how it differs from IT, the industries it powers, and much more.
Watch or listen to the interview below.
The distinction between OT and IT is often blurry, leading to confusion. OT is the unsung hero of many industries and plays a crucial role in enhancing efficiency, safety and reliability. So, what is OT, and how does it differ from IT?
OT encompasses the hardware and software systems responsible for monitoring and controlling physical processes and industrial operations. In essence, OT manages the “things” in the internet of things (IoT). Conversely, IT focuses on processing, storing and transmitting data, predominantly utilising computers, networks and software for decision-making and business processes.
While both IT and OT share similarities such as network connectivity and data exchange, their objectives and priorities diverge. IT prioritises data integrity, confidentiality and availability, while OT emphasises reliability, availability and safety of industrial processes.
The primary goals of OT include:
•Improving operational efficiency through automation, real-time adjustments and equipment health monitoring.
•Enhancing safety by controlling processes to prevent accidents and respond to emergencies.
•Increasing reliability with systems designed for harsh industrial environments.
•Enabling predictive maintenance using sensors and data analytics to anticipate equipment failures.
•Ensuring product or service quality by controlling production parameters to meet predefined standards.
OT drives various industries, including manufacturing, energy, utilities, transportation and healthcare, ensuring efficient and safe operations. For instance, in manufacturing, OT automates production lines to optimise productivity and quality, while in healthcare, it oversees medical equipment and ensures the reliability of medical procedures.
The OT field offers diverse job roles, each requiring specialised skills. OT engineers design, implement and maintain control systems and automation solutions. OT technicians troubleshoot and maintain systems. Cybersecurity specialists protect critical infrastructure from cyber threats. Data analysts gather and analyse data for efficiency and predictive maintenance. Control systems architects design the overall architecture of OT systems to meet specific industrial requirements, offering exciting opportunities for those with the right skills and passion for innovation.
The convergence of IT and OT brings about numerous benefits but also introduces new challenges, particularly in cybersecurity. A report found that 75% of OT organisations experienced at least one intrusion in the last year. A successful cyberattack on OT can result in production disruptions, safety hazards, environmental damage and economic losses. Therefore, ensuring the security of OT systems is crucial not only for business operations but also for public safety and national interests.
Robust cybersecurity measures include network segmentation, regular updates, access controls, monitoring, employee training and incident response plans. Here are some practical tips for OT security:
•Implement asset inventory and segmentation and employ micro segmentation and virtual patching solutions.
•Collaborate across IT, OT and production teams to assess cyber and production risks and inform the chief information security officer.
•Develop a vendor and OT cybersecurity platform strategy, considering a wide portfolio of solutions.
•Incorporate cybersecurity awareness education and training for all computer and mobile device users.
For more, visit https://techcentral.co.za/. TechCentral
The future of finance is on the blockchain.
That’s according to Connie Bloem, co-founder and MD of Mesh.trade, who was speaking to the TechCentral Show (TCS) about alternative (AltFi) and decentralised finance (DeFi).
Mesh is owned by 42Markets Group, which recently secured a R182-million funding round from technology investor Convergence Partners.
Much of that funding will be used in Mesh’s expansion plans.
Bloem, who lives in Paris, told TCS that Mesh is attempted to serve as a bridge between the world of traditional finance, also known as TradFi, and AltFi and DeFi.
Among other topics, Bloem chats about what these changes mean for ordinary investors.
Don’t miss a great discussion! TechCentral
Earlier this month, Cape Town-based fintech Peach Payments announced it had secured US$30-million (R570-million) in a fundraising round led by Apis Partners.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Rahul Jain, co-founder of CEO of Peach Payments, tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the funding round and what the company plans to use the money to do.
In the interview, Jain unpacks:
His background growing up in India and how his career brought him to South Africa;
What Peach Payments does and why;
The company’s business model; and
Its growth plans, including expansion outside South Africa.
Jain also explains why Peach Payments went the private equity route with the latest funding round.
Don’t miss the interview! TechCentral
MiWay has deployed advanced “conversation analytics” technology in its contact centre environment to improve the performance of customer-facing agents.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+ show, the insurer, which worked closely with CallMiner – a specialist in speech and interaction analytics – unpacks what the technology has done for its business operations.
MiWay head of business process innovation Huzair Essop, Miway lead integration analyst Asif Mahomed-Hoosen and CallMiner vice president of international operations Frank Sherlock unpack the deployment in detail on the show – watch or listen to it below.
Sherlock kicks off the conversation with a discussion about how technologies like conversation analytics software tools can help organisations like MiWay lift their game.
Huzair then chats about how MiWay is using conversation analytics to develop its workforce and improve the performance of its customer agents. He also explains what the company has been able to do with the technology that it couldn’t do before.
Other topics tackled in the discussion include:
•The complexity involved in managing disparate communication channels – whether it’s the phone, e-mail, social media, live chat or other platforms – and how companies can manage this flood of disparate interactions and make sense of it all.
•Which channels MiWay analyses with CallMiner’s tools, and how analytics has allowed the company to understand different customer journeys.
•Overcoming data silos inside organisations and how technology can help.
•Ensuring the appropriate information reaches the right people inside an organisation, and ensuring the correct course of action is taken.
•The role of artificial intelligence in conversation analytics.
Don’t miss the conversation! TechCentral
Imagine truly unlimited phone calls and texts to any local network and a large allocation of monthly mobile data for just R299/month.
That’s what MTN South Africa unveiled last month when it launched SuperFlex, a mobile tariff plan that allows consumers to choose how much data they want, coupled with unlimited minutes and SMSes and a six-month free trial to the mobile version of Disney+.
The new plans start at R299 for 10GB of anytime data. The plans on offer, all providing unlimited phone calls and SMSes, are:
•10GB: R299
•15GB: R399
•20GB: R479
MTN described SuperFlex as a “mobile plan that offers customers simplicity, customisation and flexibility” without paperwork, contact lock-in or credit checks.
Now MTN South Africa GM for the consumer segment Bertus van der Vyver shares the inside story about the launch of SuperFlex with TechCentral’s TCS+ technology show.
Van der Vyver tells TCS+ about:
•The SuperFlex offering and the market research that informed its launch;
•Why it’s an online-only product and how consumers can sign up for it;
•The level of personalisation on offer to consumers;
•The pricing strategy behind SuperFlex;
•How MTN built the product, and the work that went into building a robust backend solution to support it;
•The security measures in place to protect consumers; and
•What consumers can expect from SuperFlex in future.
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
The Information Regulator, the agency responsible for enforcing the Protection of Personal Information Act (Popia), is starting to flex its muscles.
Among other things, the regulator is tasked with investigating data breaches – including cyberattacks – and will not hesitate to mete out punishment on companies and government entities that don’t take the protection of customer or citizen information seriously.
Already engaged in an enforcement action over a cyberattack at the department of justice & constitutional development – the department was fined R5-million – the regulator is seeing a flood of self-reported incidents reach its offices. In fact, more than a thousand such incidents have been reported this year alone, a sharp increase from the 2022 figure of about 600.
TechCentral recently welcomed the Information Regulator’s chair, Adv Pansy Tlakula, onto the TechCentral Show (TCS) for a discussion about the regulator, its enforcement actions and some of the investigations it is pursuing.
In the TCS interview, Tlakula chats about:
•Her day-to-day duties as chair of the Information Regulator;
•Popia and the Promotion of Access to Information Act and the Information Regulator’s role in enforcing both pieces of legislation;
•What organisations in both the private and public sectors should know about the work of the regulator;
•Enforcement actions that it has been involved in, including the ongoing matter involving the department of justice and a resolution to a dispute with pharmacy chain Dis-Chem over a recent incident involving customer information;
•The reported cyberattack on the State Security Agency and what the regulator plans to do about it;
•The rising number of cyberattacks on public sector infrastructure, what’s driving it and what can be done about it; and
•Much more besides.
Don’t miss a great discussion! TechCentral
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+ technology show, Jaydev Chiba speaks to the chief technology officer of LSD Open Julian Gericke and senior solutions architect at Red Hat Chris Mulder about the concept of platform engineering and internal developer platforms (IDPs) and their pivotal role in modern software development.
IDPs are an evolving approach aimed at streamlining and enhancing the efficiency of software development processes within organisations.
The discussion covers:
An overview of internal developer platforms (IDPs)
The conversation begins by introducing the notion of internal developer platforms (IDPs). These platforms are designed to simplify and optimise various aspects of software development, from infrastructure management to deployment and beyond. IDPs act as a unified framework that empowers developers to focus on coding and delivering value without being burdened by the complexities of underlying infrastructure.
Focus on customer value
The overarching theme emphasises the importance of aligning software development efforts with customer needs. It underlines that the primary goal of any development process should be to deliver value to customers. This aligns with the agile philosophy of prioritising customer-centricity and iterative development.
Metrics and measurement
The interview highlights the significance of metrics and measurement in software development. It stresses the importance of setting clear metrics to assess the success of development efforts. These metrics allow organisations to track their progress, identify areas for improvement, and ensure that development initiatives are meeting customer expectations.
Transitioning to the cloud
The discussion then shifts towards cloud adoption strategies. It outlines scenarios that organisations might encounter during their journey to the cloud, catering to varying levels of cloud adoption maturity. These scenarios provide insights for CIOs, software development leaders and decision-makers as they navigate cloud migration.
A ‘hybrid first’ approach
One of the core concepts presented in the interview is the “hybrid first” approach. This approach recognises that organisations often operate in hybrid environments, combining on-premises and cloud resources. It emphasises the need to meet customers where they are, regardless of their cloud status. The goal is to abstract implementation details to ensure seamless transitions between different deployment models.
Security by design
Security emerges as a critical concern in the discussion. The TCS+ interview underscores the importance of incorporating security into the development process from the outset. A proactive “security by design” approach helps mitigate vulnerabilities and protect software against potential threats. The discussion acknowledges recent high-profile security incidents and the imperative to enhance security practices.
Open-source software and licensing
The interview touches upon the complexities of open-source software adoption and licensing. It emphasises the need for organisations to have a clear understanding of the licences associated with open-source components. The discussion acknowledges the value of open source software while highlighting the need for businesses to navigate the intricacies of licensing.
Participation in open-source communities
An essential aspect of open-source software adoption is active participation in open-source communities. The discussion encourages organisations not only to consume open-source software but also contribute to these communities. Collaboration and knowledge-sharing within these communities can lead to better software quality and mutual benefits.
For more, visit techcentral.co.za... TechCentral
TCS+ | Generative AI in cybersecurity: Next DLP on what to know
Executives from data loss prevention specialists Next DLP believe generative artificial intelligence will have both positive and negative impacts on the IT security landscape.
In this episode of TCS+, TechCentral’s Duncan McLeod is joined by Next DLP’s chief security officer, Chris Denbigh-White, and Fallon Steyn, the company’s regional sales head, to unpack this topic in greater detail.
In the discussion, Denbigh-White and Steyn chat about:
•How generative AI is being used today, both by adversaries and by those defending organisations against those adversaries.
•The impact of generative AI as it becomes increasingly more difficult to discern between the output of humans and machines.
•The need for updated regulations and legislation in this field, including in South Africa.
•The risks to company data of using generative AI tools.
•How businesses internationally – and in South Africa – are using generative AI tools. What are they finding useful in them? How are chief information security officers thinking about handling these tools in the enterprise?
•The countries and industries that are leading the way in addressing security concerns around generative AI.
Don’t miss a fascinating and topical discussion, especially if you’re in the cybersecurity or data loss prevention field. TechCentral
Nearly half of 800 African survey participants have fallen victim to an online scam at least once, losing thousands of dollars in the process and compromising their personal data. Alarmingly, more than half (53%) of the respondents who fell victim were convinced the offer was legitimate because the website looked real, while nearly 48% of the scams were financial.
This was revealed in a recent episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, featuring Anna Collard, senior vice president for content strategy and evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa. It is also worth mentioning that Collard was recently recognised as the Cyber Security Woman of the Year 2023 “People’s Choice” Award in Las Vegas.
Collard, who lives in Cape Town, is a certified business analyst with multiple security certifications, including CISSP, CISA, CIPP/IT, ex PCI DSS QSA, ISO 27001 Implementer, and auditor. She is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Metaverse for the 2023-2024 term and a board member of the MiDO Cyber Academy Programme, aimed at underserved communities in South Africa to bridge the cyber skills divide.
The conversation with TechCentral’s TCS+ unpacked some alarming statistics, all of which can be found in KnowBe4’s 2023 Online Scams and Victims in Africa report. Only recently released, the report is based on a survey of 800 respondents across eight African countries, including South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt, Mauritius and Botswana.
Other key findings included that distraction and multitasking made 43% of the victims fall for an online scam, and that financial scams affected nearly 48% of respondents.
“These numbers highlight that online scams have evolved,” says Collard. “What is concerning is that 43% of the victims were distracted and multitasking when they fell for the scam, which highlights how easy it is for a person to make a mistake when they are not paying attention. Their emotional states can affect a person’s judgment, awareness and decision making, causing them to be more vulnerable to online deception,” says Collard.
Financial scams were the most common type of online fraud, affecting nearly half of the respondents (50%). Other prevalent scams involved fake investments (30%), cryptocurrencies and NFTs (29%), brand impersonation (28%), information theft (24%), online shopping (21%), and fake job offers (21%). Less frequent but still significant scams included the classic Nigerian scam (17%), family or friend impersonation (18%), law enforcement impersonation (7%), tax fraud (6%), holiday fraud (9%), romance fraud (13%), and lottery fraud (15%).
An e-mail was the preferred channel for scammers to initiate contact, accounting for 24% of the cases. Social media came in second with 19%, followed by WhatsApp with 10% and other messaging services like Telegram with 8%. In Nigeria, however, social media was the most used platform for scams (32%), while in South Africa, e-mail was the dominant method (28%).
The scammers often used social engineering techniques to convince their victims, such as creating rapport or trust by making websites look legitimate, sending messages that appealed to emotions, using social media profiles that seemed authentic, and avoiding spelling or grammar mistakes.
Collard says that the statistics reveal a more evolved and sophisticated network of scammers who use emerging technology to lure people into costly mistakes. Some 30% lost between US$100 and $1 000, 40% around $100, and 9% more than $1 000.
The report also showed that falling for a scam had a significant psychological impact on many victims. While 23% said it had little or no effect on them, nearly 50% felt a strong or moderate impact. The results highlight how easy it is for victims to blame themselves, when in reality, they were deceived by cunning scam tactics.
Read more at https://techcentral.co.za/. TechCentral
When JSE-listed Blue Label Telecoms released its annual results two weeks ago, it showed its core business continuing to grow at a respectable pace. Yet investors dumped the share, worried about a lack of disclosure about Cell C’s performance.
Now, in an exclusive interview with the TechCentral Show (TCS), the company’s founders and co-CEOs, brothers Brett and Mark Levy, have spelt out exactly why they believe investors have punished the share, why they decided not to publish numbers for Cell C (this time around), and what their strategy is for the long-troubled mobile operator after the completion last year of its second recapitalisation in six years.
In the interview, Mark Levy looks back to the founding of the company more than 20 years ago, how it pivoted into cellular airtime, and its listing on the JSE.
The conversation later shifts to a detailed discussion with Brett Levy on Cell C. He answers a wide range of questions, including:
•Why did Blue Label buy Cell C in the first place?
•What went wrong after the first recap?
•What’s stop things going awry again at Cell C?
•Why is Blue Label pursuing a controlling stake in the mobile operator?
•What’s the potential upside at Cell C?
•Just how important is the mobile virtual network operator business? (Cell C recently concluded an MVNO deal with Capitec.)
The brothers also tackle the difficulty in understanding Blue Label’s results, driven by the highly complex restructuring at Cell C. They tackle these questions:
•Shouldn’t Blue Label be doing more to make its results understandable to shareholders, especially ordinary investors?
•Doesn’t buying control of Cell C expose Blue Label to even greater potential risk?
•What’s the outlook for Blue Label’s core business?
•What are the exciting growth areas in the core business, such as betting/gaming?
•Is Blue Label mulling a buyout of minorities and a delisting from the JSE?
Don’t miss the most detailed and information-packed interview the Levy brothers have given in years. If you enjoyed the interview, please consider subscribing on YouTube or your favourite podcast app. TechCentral
Cryptography and encryption are pivotal in modern cybersecurity operations. Altron Systems Integration senior manager for cryptography Caryn Vos tells TechCentral’s TCS+ technology show about key reasons why this is the case.
Vos tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about why organisations need to get encryption right if they’re serious about protecting their data assets.
The conversation explores the evolving security threat landscape and why companies need to respond appropriately. Ransomware remains a primary risk to South African organisations – and organisations around the world – but other risks are also emerging, says Vos.
In this episode of TCS+, Vos unpacks how encryption can help in the fight against ransomware and other threats; how encryption protects data both at move and at rest; the impact of corporate espionage; the role of regulations and legislation such as the Protection of Personal Information Act and how encryption can help with regulatory compliance; and how encryption can be used to build trust with customers and other stakeholders.
Don’t miss a great discussion with an expert in the field. TechCentral
It’s easy to keep layering security solutions on top of a company’s IT systems, but this can lead to complexity, high costs and other unnecessary headaches.
This is where security control validation can play a big role, according to information security specialists CYBER1 Solutions.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, Duncan McLeod speaks to CYBER1 Solutions MD Jayson O’Reilly and the company’s GM for commercial sales and operations, Clarence Beukes, about why companies should seriously consider embarking on a security control validation project.
To kick things off, O’Reilly provides a quick refresher on CYBER1 Solutions – what it does, the segments of the market it targets, and its client profile.
Both O’Reilly and Beukes then unpack, at a high level, the big trends they are seeing in the security space in 2023, especially in the South African context.
The conversation turns to security control validation, which CYBER1 Solutions describes as being of “significant importance” in building organisational defences against cyberattacks.
O’Reilly provides an overview of security control validation and why companies should be taking it seriously. Among other things, it’s about allocating resources more effectively to focus on areas that provide a better return on investment in security spending. A successful validation project should help organisations enhance their cyber resilience, ensure regulatory compliance, and inform the adoption of security controls.
Beukes explains how validation achieves these outcomes, what’s involved in such a project, whether it’s a once-off exercise or an ongoing process, and how success is measured.
To conclude, the conversation turns to the future role of artificial intelligence technology in enhancing cybersecurity operations. Also, what threat does AI pose to organisations, and how might adversaries use it to their advantage?
Don’t miss a great discussion!
About CYBER1 Solutions
CYBER1 Solutions is a cybersecurity specialist operating in Southern Africa, East and West Africa, and Dubai, and elsewhere in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.
Our solutions deliver information security; IT risk management; fraud detection; governance and compliance; and a full range of managed services. We also provide bespoke security services across the spectrum, with a portfolio that ranges from the formulation of our customers’ security strategies to the daily operation of endpoint security solutions. To do this, we partner with world-leading security vendors to deliver cutting-edge technologies augmented by our wide range of professional services.
Our services allow organisations in every sector to prevent attacks by providing the visibility into vulnerabilities they need to rapidly detect compromises, respond to breaches and stop attacks before they become an issue.
For more information, visit www.c1-s.com. TechCentral
It’s been a year since investors, including the business’s own customers, came to the rescue the Sigfox internet-of-things (IoT) network in South Africa.
Now its chief commercial officer, Sumenish Naidoo, has told the TechCentral Show (TCS) that Sigfox South Africa is not only on a sustainable growth trajectory, but has big big growth plans for the rest of this decade.
This comes after Remgro’s CIVH in 2021 pulled the plug on Sigfox operator SqwidNet, citing weak customer demand. Founded eight years ago under CIVH subsidiary Dark Fibre Africa, the difficulties at SqwidNet came as a shock to its customers, including Discovery Insure and ADT, that had come to rely heavily on the nationwide Sigfox network.
Former CIVH CEO Raymond Ndlovu said in an interview with TechCentral at the time that the decision to shut down SqwidNet, which by then had been moved out of Dark Fibre Africa as a separate entity under CIVH, was because customer take-up had not been as strong as hoped.
The Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns resulted in depressed commercial activity, which worsened the problems at SqwidNet.
Support from SqwidNet’s customers, though, ensured the Sigfox network was saved. CIVH has remained a shareholder in the newly created Sigfox South Africa, albeit now as a minority one, along with Macrocomm, Discovery Insure, Fidelity ADT and Buffet Investments.
In this episode of TCS, Naidoo tells TechCentral editor-in-chief Duncan McLeod about what’s happened at Sigfox South Africa since the rescue deal last year, and why he believes there is still a significant opportunity for growth in IoT in the country, despite the troubles experienced at SqwidNet.
Naidoo also talks about:
•What IoT is, and why it could help grease the wheels of commerce;
•The history of Sigfox in South Africa, and how Sigfox’s technology differs from traditional cellular communication and other IoT protocols;
•What the Sigfox network in South Africa looks like today;
•How the network is being used; and
•How consumers can get their hands on Sigfox-capable IoT devices.
Don’t miss a fascinating interview! TechCentral
Grant Phillips, group CEO of e4, recently joined Jaydev Chiba on TechCentral’s TCS+ to discuss the company’s inner workings, its future goals and its strategic outlook.
With expertise and extensive experience in the proptech and fintech spaces, e4 has positioned itself as an industry leader. Its longstanding client relationships and reputation for reliability and knowledge make e4 a trusted advisor across business sectors.
Leveraging emerging technologies to meet evolving market demands and deliver exceptional value to its clients, e4 not only provides world-class solutions, but most importantly plays a strategic role as a partner to its clients.
Close collaboration with clients allows e4 access to valuable insights into its client’s challenges and needs, enabling it to offer customised solutions that enhance internal processes and elevate customer experiences.
Looking towards the future, Phillips acknowledges the rapidly evolving nature of the industry and the need for continuous adaptation. e4 is committed to remaining relevant by actively pursuing research and development initiatives, and closely monitoring emerging technologies to drive innovation and meet clients’ evolving needs.
In conclusion, despite the challenges faced by the industry, particularly in recent times, Phillips expresses confidence in e4’s position and its ability to navigate turbulent times. The company’s supportive leadership team and disciplined execution approach allow it to adapt to market conditions and continue to deliver exceptional value to partners. TechCentral
It’s hard to believe that Samsung Electronics is already five generations into the Galaxy Z series of foldable smartphones, with the Korean consumer electronics giant this week launching its Fold5 and Flip5 globally and in South Africa.
The devices show that Samsung has perfected the folding-screen technology – and its commanding market share of the fast-growing segment is testimony to this.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, Justin Hume, vice president for mobile at Samsung Electronics in South Africa, unpacks why the Galaxy Z series is critically important to the company, and why it has directed significant research and development spending into making the category a big success.
In this episode of TCS+, Hume chats about what’s new in both the Flip5 and the Fold5 – highlights include the bigger external display on the Flip5 and a new, superior Flex Hinge on the Fold5.
Hume also discusses the camera capabilities in the new phones and, of course, the pricing details of the new models, including trade-in options and the special offers Samsung is providing at launch.
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
In a landscape dominated by mobile transactions and connections, fewer than 30% of individuals say they are “very concerned” about cybercrime. However, the risk of crypto scams, social engineering attacks, ransomware and phishing remains consistently high.
This was revealed in a recent report dubbed Cybersecurity & Awareness Report 2023 by KnowBe4, which was unpacked during a recent interview with TechCentral’s TCS+ technology show.
Senior vice president for content strategy and evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa Anna Collard delved into the findings of the report, which provided a comprehensive view of the African cyber landscape and users’ perception of threats by examining key metrics around cybersecurity and awareness.
The report was based on insights from 800 respondents across South Africa, Botswana, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Mauritius and Nigeria.
Discussing the complexity of businesses’ and individuals’ use of the internet, it emerged that life skills are required to navigate different channels, such as WhatsApp, while context-switching between personal and business-related conversations.
Unfortunately, cybercriminals are aware of this distraction and are constantly developing new ways to manipulate users’ distractibility.
According to Collard, a priority was looking at digital device use, digital skills and connectivity to understand fully how devices are used, the perception of risk, as well as the applications most used on these devices.
In Africa, WhatsApp is used extensively for work, more so than in other developed countries. However, there is a lack of corporate advice and awareness around the associated risks. This highlights the importance of ensuring that users understand the risks and know how to use the platform safely.
Cybersecurity awareness also remains low on the continent, with the initial baseline phishing security test results at an average of 31%, meaning one in every three employees is likely to click on a suspicious link or e-mail, or comply with a fraudulent request.
The report also found that distractions and multitasking (38%) and lack of awareness or training (52%) are the primary reasons for staff members making security mistakes.
The report also shone the spotlight on how many are unable to identify common cybersecurity threats like ransomware (43%). Luckily, the majority (60%) understand what two-factor authentication is and 62% could identify a good password.
A major concern was that one in five considered “P@$$word!” to be a secure password.
Collard said it is also key to understand how users experienced different types of cybercrime. The research discovered that just over a third (34%) believed they could recognise a security incident if they saw one.
However, 26% admitted to clicking on a phishing e-mail, 51% have had a virus infection, and 32% have lost money to a scam or con artist, which belied that assertion. Unfortunately, people are still too quick to click on links or attachments from people or brands they think are familiar to them.
Ultimately, it became painfully clear during the discussion that African businesses and internet users remain uninformed about how to mitigate cyber threats, which leaves them vulnerable. Collard stressed the need for cybersecurity training and awareness programmes. TechCentral
Nigerian fintech Paystack, which was acquired by Stripe, the Irish-American firm founded by the Collison brothers in 2020 for US$200-million, has big plans to expand elsewhere in Africa.
Joel Bronkowski, Paystack’s country head for South Africa, joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to talk about these expansion plans as well as the state of fintech on the continent.
Paystack, which is headquartered in Lagos, was founded by Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi and received early funding from Silicon Valley start-up accelerator Y Combinator.
In the TCS interview, Bronkowski also chats about:
•Paystack’s plans for the South African market;
•How the company is approaching the South African market in comparison to its strategy for Nigeria and other countries;
•The problems the company is trying to solve;
•The Stripe acquisition and what it means for Paystack; and
•Paystack’s growth strategy.
Don’t miss a great disruption about disruption in financial services in Africa. TechCentral
Power outages, particularly load shedding, are causing significant business disruption in South Africa. Electricity supply challenges are disrupting daily life, affecting businesses and damaging the economy.
TechCentral’s Jaydev Chiba chatted to Fikile Sibiya, CIO at e4, the fintech solutions provider, about the challenges of managing IT in the dark (literally) in South Africa.
The conversation focuses on the difficulties IT teams face in providing uninterrupted IT services amid power constraints and other challenges.
Sibiya highlights the need for companies to think differently about their ownership of systems and facilities and suggests that outsourcing data centre services to specialised providers with backup power capabilities could be the answer.
The conversation also delves into the importance of considering alternative energy solutions, like solar power, to ensure continuity and reduce dependence on the grid.
Cybersecurity also comes up in the discussion in the interview, and Sibiya stresses the importance of implementing robust security measures, protecting the network perimeter and being prepared for potential security breaches.
They also touch on the skills shortage in the IT industry and the challenges of attracting and retaining talent. Sibiya emphasises the need for upskilling and cultivating a supportive industry culture to encourage professionals to stay.
The interview ends with a discussion on hybrid work models, with Sibiya advocating for a flexible approach that prioritises work-life balance and stresses the importance of security and awareness training for remote workers.
About e4
e4 is a technology company specialising in digitalisation. With more than 20years’ experience, our knowledge team understands the complexity of a digital journey and partners with clients to provide bespoke and innovative solutions that suit their unique needs. For more information, visit www.e4.co.za. TechCentral
Luke Jedeikin and Claude Hanan are well known for founding Superbalist, the online fashion store bought in 2014 by Takealot Group.
Now the pair has embarked on a new venture, launched in The Foschini Group (TFG) stable, called Bash, and they tell Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) all about it.
To start the discussion, Hanan and Jedeikin talk about the origin of Superbalist – it began life as a group-buying deals site akin to Groupon. They then chat about how the big Takealot deal happened and what it meant for Superbalist.
The conversation them turns to how the TFG opportunity came about and what the JSE-listed retail group is hoping to achieve with the launch of Bash – it’s online at bash.com. They also explain why they chose the name Bash and what was involved in securing a four-letter dot-com domain.
Among many other topics, Jedeikin and Hanan provide their views on:
•The state of e-commerce in South Africa;
•Why Bash is a mobile-first app shopping destination – it also works fine on the web;
•The complexities of selling fashion online; and
•The competitive landscape in South Africa and how it’s evolving.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion! TechCentral
What does the future hold for e-commerce in South Africa? Takealot Group CEO Mamongae Mahlare joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to unpack this and more.
In the interview, Mahlare talks about her career background and how she came to Takealot. She also discusses:
•The transformative impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, how it drove up online shopping and why it’s impact is still being felt.
•Takealot Group’s slowing growth – why it’s happening, and what it says about the e-commerce space in South Africa.
•The impact of increased competition from traditional retailers embracing internet commerce.
•The Competition Commission’s investigation into online markets, and why the authorities need to tread carefully.
•The rumoured launch later this year of an Amazon marketplace in South Africa, and how this will impact the market and Takealot.
•What will shape the development of e-commerce in South Africa in the coming years.
•The role, if any, for the Post Office.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion. TechCentral
Volvo Cars, part of Sweden’s Volvo Group, has seen a big growth in interest in electric vehicles from the South African motoring public – and the company hopes the introduction early next year of its most affordable EV yet, the EX30, will accelerate that.
That’s according to Volvo Cars South Africa MD Greg Maruszewski, who was speaking to Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) – watch or listen to the interview below.
Volvo has been one of the most aggressive car manufacturers in pivoting from internal combustion engines to electric motors. Indeed, it said two years ago already that it intends to become a fully electric car company by 2030.
In this episode of TCS, Maruszewski unpacks:
•Volvo’s transition to EVs and its strategy around electro-mobility;
•What South Africans think about EVs, and why they’re warming to the concept;
•Where Volvo is positioned in the car market, and why some of its newer models, like the XC30, are aimed at a younger audience;
•Volvo’s expectations for the EX30 compact sports utility vehicle in the local market, and more details about the new model – including performance, battery range, integrated technology and pricing, which is expected to start at about R776 000;
•Volvo’s relationship with Google;
•The development of charging infrastructure in South Africa;
•What government could be doing to encourage greater EV adoption; and
•The future of the cars – what can we expect in the coming years?
Don’t miss a fascinating interview! TechCentral
Bryan Hattingh, CEO of Cycan, is well-known in South Africa’s technology industry for his leadership coaching and for helping companies find top talent.
Hattingh joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) to discuss what he believes is required of leadership in a post-Covid world – hint: it’s not more of the same.
He discusses a range of issues in the interview, including:
•How the pandemic changed what’s required of business leaders;
•How companies can maintain their unique cultures in the era of remote working;
•What artificial intelligence means for the modern workplace;
•What works best – hybrid, remote or in-office only – and why;
•Why companies might not be measuring success correctly – it should go beyond regular reporting on financial metrics such as Heps and Ebitda;
•How firms can help employees find meaning and satisfaction in the workplace; and
•The emigration wave in South Africa and its impact on the country.
Don’t miss a great discussion! TechCentral
First National Bank’s Christoph Nieuwoudt is one of the leading South African – and global – experts on artificial intelligence.
The financial services group’s chief data and analytics offer, Nieuwoudt joins Duncan McLeod on TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology show to explain why, in his view, South African organisations cannot afford to ignore the revolutionary changes that will be driven by AI in the years ahead.
Nieuwoudt, who graduated with a doctorate in engineering focused on machine learning long before AI was a hot-button topic, talks about his doctoral thesis and his career history, which included co-designing the computer engineering degree at the University of Pretoria.
In this episode of TCS+, Nieuwoudt unpacks:
•What exactly is involved in being a chief data and analytics officer;
•Why AI is critically important to the FirstRand Group and its subsidiaries, including First National Bank and Rand Merchant Bank, and what it allows the group to do differently – and better;
•What it means for FirstRand and FNB/RMB customers;
•The importance of generative AI in business and what it means for productivity gains;
•The applications of AI in banking;
•FirstRand’s AI reskilling initiative – why it’s important, and the outcomes that are expected;
•Ethical, legal and reputational considerations around AI, and FirstRand’s approach to these;
•The people element – and the real fear that people could lose their jobs;
•The cultural and change management issues to be aware of when implementing AI-led initiatives; and
•What youngsters interested in this field should be studying.
Don’t miss a fascinating conversation! TechCentral
It’s been just over 20 years since Andile Ngcaba quit his government job – he was director-general of communications – and became an investor in the technology sector.
Now, in an interview with Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS), Ngcaba looks back at the past two decades, the formation of Convergence Partners, the investments the business has made and why, and its focus areas.
Ngcaba, who splits his time between Africa and Silicon Valley – where he has a home – unpacks the recent announcement that Convergence Partners Investments is rebranding as Solcon Capital and has appointed a new CEO, Pramod Venkatesh, and why its focus has been broadened beyond Africa to both developing and developed markets.
“Under this new brand, Solcon will focus on international deep tech investments in generative AI and large language models, synthetic data and big data, cybersecurity, and quantum computing across South Africa, India and Southeast Asia, leveraging scale through platform economics,” Solcon said in a statement last week.
Also in this TCS interview, Ngcaba talks about:
•What he has learnt from his time in Silicon Valley, and why it’s not easy to replicate the Valley model in other parts of the model. “It’s more a state of mind,” Ngcaba tells TechCentral.
•What he set out to achieve when he started Convergence Partners.
•The highlights of the investments the company has made over the years.
•What excites him the technology space today, and why.
The original Convergence Partners pitch presentation to investor Nedbank, which Ngcaba talks about in the opening minutes of the interview, is available to download on TechCentral's website.
Don’t miss a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion! TechCentral
Following the recent decision to rebrand MTN GlobalConnect as Bayobab, founder and CEO Frédéric Schepens joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to chat about the telecommunications infrastructure provider’s expansion plans.
Bayobab, which owns stakes in a number of subsea cable systems and other telecoms infrastructure, is the result of “change under way to position the business as a world-class, Africa-focused open-access digital infrastructure platform serving not just MTN but other third parties as customers”, MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita said in May.
“We are also going to bring in strategic partners into the business over time who will provide skills and capital to support and accelerate the growth of this business.”
In this episode of TCS, Schepens unpacks all the infrastructure that Bayobab owns, the huge investments it is making in subsea and terrestrial fibre in Africa, and where the company expects to direct its capital spending in the years ahead. TechCentral
If you are worried about the threat of social engineering and the ways cybercriminals are looking to attack our most vulnerable assets, then this TCS+ conversation is not going to bring you much comfort. What it will do, though, is remind you that you are responsible for your actions and your inactions.
TCS+ welcomed Anna Collard back into the TechCentral studio to hear more about mindfulness and some of the techniques and tools we can apply to bring our emotional and physical selves into a more focused state.
Collard is senior vice president of content strategy and evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa and has a realistic perspective of the cybersecurity landscape. She promotes knowledge sharing and skills transfer while also sharing practical insights into cybersecurity and how susceptible we are to social engineering tricks if we are not mindful.
Given the complexity of generative AI and the interdisciplinary nature of AI research, the tech giants (Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Meta, for example) are likely to form more partnerships with academic institutions, research organisations and brands, agencies and other companies that may not have well-considered regulations. This is all happening while AI technologies are becoming more powerful and widespread and Collard hints at the growing concern around the ethical and societal implications of AI.
This is where critical thinking comes into play. Collard suggests that it is everyone's responsibility to pause, reflect on their gut feel and question anything that may be at all suspicious. It is our responsibility to seek advice and sound the alarm if necessary.
She encourages companies to invest more in developing guidelines, tools and procedures to ensure the responsible use of AI and to encourage awareness and vigilance. This includes being transparent about your use of AI, your decision-making methods, how to mitigate against bias, enhance privacy protection and much more.
The goal is to keep the mind active and employ very specific decision-making when confronted by potential phishing e-mails or cyber threats,” said Collard. “Cybercriminals, as well as fake news, use emotionally triggering content such as fear, greed or curiosity to trick us out of critical thinking. If we learn to use our heightened emotions as early warning signs, applying mindfulness techniques to quieten down and pay attention before we react, we can remain in control, focus better and in turn prevent cyberattacks.”
Security training is essential for modern business, particularly when it comes to giving employees the tools they need to recognise threats and make informed decisions. However, as the world moves through the fallout from the pandemic, global uncertainty and ongoing stress, adding a wellness dimension to security training is fast becoming a critical factor in ensuring that the training kicks in when tiredness takes over.
In South Africa, there are multiple external factors also contributing to the burnout and stress cycle of cyberattacks on the workplace and in our personal lives. A timely example is that of load shedding, which has reached a critical level and has put immense pressure on people to perform fast and within tight windows of opportunity.
It has also damaged systems, introduced technology quirks and left people frantically clicking to get working. This scenario introduces vulnerabilities such as poor awareness and heightened stress levels that may very easily be taken advantage of by hackers. TechCentral
The process of transferring property from one owner to another can be a major hassle, involving a ton of paperwork and many hours. E4, a company that leverages technology to transform customer processes, joined TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology show to discusses innovating the property transfer process for a more efficient future.
Jaydev Chiba chatted to e4 Strategic IT executive Clive Bredenkamp to shed light on the evolving world of property transfer in South Africa. With a background in technology and problem solving, he explained that while South Africa's property transfer system is advanced in terms of legislation and protection, there are still challenges that need to be addressed.
Bredenkamp said e4 has been at the forefront of revolutionising property transfer processes for the past 23 years. Initially, property transfer involved manual paperwork and courier services, but e4 introduced secure electronic communication through email and digital certificates, streamlining the process.
According to him, the private sector needs solutions to enhance the front end of the process to make it more efficient and transparent. Currently, consumers lack information and face delays due to the involvement of multiple parties.
The company has been working on solutions to optimise the property transfer value chain. It has developed secure application programming interfaces, digital switches and ecosystems that bring together various parties involved in the process. By leveraging technology, e4 aims to reduce turnaround times, improve transparency and enable faster property registration.
The conversation also touched on the impact of Covid-19 on the industry. The pandemic accelerated the adoption of web-based technology, allowing remote document signing and collaboration. It also forced digitisation, lowering barriers to entry for web-based solutions.
Looking ahead, Bredenkamp envisions a future where property transfer becomes even more digitised. The use of electronic documents, data verification and transparent digital registries will enhance efficiency and reduce processing times. Security and data privacy are paramount in this digitised process, and he stressed the company’s commitment to secure data storage, encryption and compliance with privacy regulations.
The discussion delves into the benefits of digitising the property transfer process for buyers, sellers and other stakeholders. Digitisation enables greater transparency, lowers the risk of fraud and delays, and improves overall user experience. The goal is to create a secure and efficient ecosystem that simplifies property transfer and empowers individuals to track and participate in their transactions with confidence, Bredenkamp said. TechCentral
Fortinet recently released its 2023 Cloud Security Report. The report surveyed 752 cybersecurity professionals from around the globe and across all industries to uncover the key priorities and challenges that must be addressed to empower cloud success.
To discuss the finding and related topics, Gary Peel, business development manager: cloud at Fortinet Africa, joined TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology show. He unpacked several key topics.
First up was a discussion about the current state of cloud adoption – how organisations both locally and globally are using public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments to drive their digital transformation, and what benefits they are experiencing as a result.
Peel touched on the benefits of the cloud, including how cloud computing offers more flexibility, scalability, agility, availability and business continuity for enterprises – and how it helps them improve their customer responsiveness and competitive edge.
Peel shared many of his own insights and those of the cloud security report into why cloud security is so important and also some of the security challenges in the cloud – how cybersecurity professionals are concerned about cloud security risks such as misconfiguration, data breaches, unauthorised access, malware attacks, compliance issues, and lack of visibility and control.
Finally, to make these issues practical to the TechCentral audience, the discussion turned to the key priorities for cloud security – how security teams are allocating their budgets, selecting their solutions, and implementing their best practices to protect their cloud workloads and data across different cloud providers and platforms.
This all helped paint a clearer picture of the impressive capabilities of Fortinet: discovery, free skills development and training, advanced certification, architectural reviews, and consulting.
Cloud security spend is on the increase and the overall spend on secure cloud networking will surpass traditional networking by 2030. This convergence is already happening, and Fortinet prides itself in consolidating its own internal capabilities through research and development and then patenting both its endpoint detections and network security functionality to provide a more integrated ecosystem.
If you are seeking clarity and need to understand more about the topic and what guardrails you may need to put in place, watch or listen to the interview. And don’t forget to read the Fortinet report. Follow the company on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit www.fortinet.com. TechCentral
Telkom’s asssets are in high demand, but CEO Serame Taukobong has insisted the company “does not need a knight in shining armour” to come riding to its rescue.
In this TechCentral Show (TCS) interview with Taukobong, the Telkom boss provides his views on the interest received from a consortium that includes former CEO Sipho Maseko and Mauritius-based Axian Telecom, as well as MTN Group signalling that it, too, may still be interested in a deal.
MTN walked away from early stage talks with Telkom last year after the latter’s board agreed to entertain a rival offer from wireless broadband provider Rain, which had sought a merger with Telkom. But this week, during Telkom’s annual results presentation to. Investors, MTN issued a statement in which it said a deal makes sense for shareholders of both entities.
In the interview, at the JSE in Sandton, Taukobong answered several pressing questions:
•Without corporate action, can Telkom survive and thrive in the longer term?
•How supportive is government towards a partial or full sale of Telkom?
•How will market consolidation likely happen and can South Africa’s mobile market sustain four infrastructure competitors in Telkom, Vodacom, MTN and Rain?
•Are the retrenchments at Telkom over, or is there still more pain to come?
•What’s the prognosis for capital expenditure at Telkom, and why did mobile spending outpace revenue growth?
•What’s hurting Telkom’s free cash flow (a negative R2.7-billion in the 2023 financial year), and what is management doing to address the problem?
•Does it still make sense for Telkom to own an IT services business?
•What are the plans to unlock shareholder value, especially in Gyro?
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
With South Africa being a favourite target of cyberattackers worldwide, and with the threats growing in both volume and sophistication, local organisations must do more to mitigate these threats.
TechCentral hosted Richard Frost, head of product for cybersecurity at Armata, on the TCS+ business technology show and was encouraged by the sophisticated service that Armata provides to organisations of all sizes. This includes not only analysis, system “road-mapping” and detection of potential attacks, but also the ability to automate a practical response to an identified threat.
Active threat hunting is a preparedness practice that Armata encourages. This involves carrying out cyberattacks on oneself to improve both internal skills and overall security posture. This is often facilitated as not only an analysis exercise, but also a learning opportunity for those company representatives who might not have cybersecurity built into their daily routine.
The conversation covers malicious attacks such as ransomware, malware and phishing, as well as unintended breaches. Frost shares a harrowing story of a CEO’s office camera being hacked using the Wi-Fi password “admin”. An innocent but careless mistake of a facilities technician who, quite simply, didn’t consider the potential impact a weak password on a camera could have on cybersecurity.
This further illustrates the point that South African organisations are vulnerable to such attacks through multiple points of access such as supply chains and third-party providers.
Malicious ransomware can sit idle inside your digital infrastructure for months before becoming active and encrypting your organisation’s data. It can behave like any other legitimate application and avoid detection. Frost’s solution is to implement precautionary measures to mitigate against potential threats and disruption because, as much as you think it might not happen to you, when it does, it really hurts.
Cybercriminals will try to encrypt or manipulate data or surreptitiously engage in privilege escalation, so you need endpoint detection and response tools in place before it happens.
With its specialised tools and expert skills, Armata approaches every client’s system with the express intention of helping uncover loopholes and hidden threats as well as improving the skills of cybersecurity personnel.
Armata is positioned as the cybersecurity arm of Vivica Holdings (formerly Vox). TechCentral
Senior Altron executive Collin Govender is passionate about leadership – and believes South Africa needs much more of it is to solve its myriad challenges.
Govender – who started his career as a forklift operator in a Durban warehouse and who today heads two important businesses in the Altron stable, Altron Systems Integration and Altron Karabina – joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) to discuss the topic.
The conversation starts with a discussion about Govender’s career in IT, which included 17 years at T-Systems, and how the Altron opportunity (now opportunities, after he took the reins at Systems Integration in addition to his role leading Karabina) came about.
He also unpacks his plans for Altron Systems Integration, where it is positioned in the market and the opportunity for acquisitions – and why systems integration has become a scale game.
The conversation then turns to leadership, and the role it plays in business and society. Govender talks about his own management style, and also shares his insights into why he believes South Africa’s biggest problems flow from a lack of decisive and accountable leadership. The fix can be applied to business and politics. But what will it take? Govender’s ideas deserve attention. TechCentral
Fortifying one’s most valuable assets requires additional security, yet globally these security skills are in short supply.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+ technology show, Ian McShane, vice president of strategy at Arctic Wolf Networks, offers his insights into how organisations of all sizes can improve their cybersecurity posture despite the dearth of experienced IT security personnel. Watch or listen to the interview below.
A recently published Arctic Wolf survey found that 68% of organisations identified staffing-related issues as the number one threat to achieving their objectives.
The scenario is by no means unique to South Africa. In fact, if anything, the country is benefitting from public and private initiatives backfilling the market and from the shared learning that Arctic Wolf, as a global player, brings to the situation.
Large organisations have a perceived advantage in that they can afford to employ more people, have greater processing capacity and more tool stacks as lines of defence. However, the challenge of finding the right people with the right skills, nurturing that talent and building a strong security culture remains. It is a full-time commitment and comes at huge cost, not to mention the additional cost of retaining such talent.
Small and medium-sized enterprises face the same adversaries and are often so focused on business as usual that they don’t dedicate enough time or resources to lurking security risks.
McShane, whose organisation has grown from strength to strength since 2012 and has the capacity to scrutinise vast quantities of data, takes a practical view on mitigating this risk. He believes in complementing the existing skills and tools that may already exist.
Companies leverage Arctic Wolf’s expertise as a third-party MDR (manage, detect and response) service and are operationalised rapidly. The immediate threat landscape is scanned and the health check radiated on a customisable dashboard. This immediately augments the chief information security officer’s security posture and helps triage the severity of identified threats.
McShane suggests that all organisations should consider implementing 24/7/365 managed services and using the operationalised toolset and data, while addressing the skills gap and nurturing talent to become more au fait with the ever-evolving threats and response mechanisms.
To review Arctic Wolf’s 10 cybersecurity predictions, please visit its website and review its lab reports after you’ve listened to this insightful conversation. TechCentral
Africa Data Centres CEO Tesh Durvasula returns to TechCentral’s TCS+ technology show for a wide-ranging discussion on the digital transformation opportunity in Africa.
Durvasula explains in the interview why Africa Data Centres is excited about what digital transformation means for the continent as well as its citizens, businesses and governments.
In this episode of TCS+, Durvasula unpacks:
•The latest developments at Africa Data Centres, including new data centre builds;
•What digital transformation entails in the African context;
•The unique challenges African organisations face in their digital transformation initiatives – and how Africa Data Centres is working to solve these;
•Examples of how success digital transformation initiatives and data centre developments have positively impacted businesses and communities on the continent; and
•The role that data centres will play in digital transformation in Africa as well as the opportunities they present for economic growth and innovation.
He also chats about the regulatory landscape and how companies should be approaching issues such as data privacy and information security, especially in the context of cloud computing.
Don’t miss the interview! TechCentral
The rise and fall of Nokia’s mobile phone business has been well documented. Once dominant in the feature-phone era, the Finnish company was caught flat-footed by the launch of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android.
The acquisition of Nokia’s handset business by Microsoft – desperate at the time for its Windows Phone operating system to be a meaningful third player in smartphone software and also desperate for Nokia not to embrace Google’s Android – went awry.
Eventually, Microsoft exited the phone business entirely, selling the phone business back to Nokia (whose main business is selling telecommunications gear to network operators), writing off billions of dollars in the process, and leaving the mobile OS market as a virtual duopoly controlled by Apple and Google.
But the Nokia phone brand never went away. After the Microsoft collapse, a team ex-Nokia executives founded HMD Global, a Chinese-Finnish phone maker, and licensed the Nokia brand name to continue building smartphones – this time running Android.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), Duncan McLeod is joined in TechCentral’s Johannesburg studio by Patrick Henchie, head of product and operations at HMD Global in sub-Saharan Africa, to unpack some of the history of the Nokia brand, how HMD got its start, the company’s market focus, and what’s coming next from the firm in both handsets and tablets.
In this TCS interview, Henchie talks about:
•His favourite legacy Nokia phone and why he loved it;
•HMD’s relationship with Google;
•Why the company does not compete directly with Apple and Samsung in top-tier flagship devices, preferring instead to cater to the mid-market and entry-level tiers;
•The Nokia phone line-up: the C series, G series and X series, and where they fit in HMD’s portfolio and in the market;
•What South Africans think of the Nokia brand today; and
•Why HMD still makes feature phones.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion about a storied brand. TechCentral
Developments in artificial intelligence are going to have far-reaching impacts on every industry, and every company needs to craft an AI strategy.
This is according to Mark Nasila, chief data and analytics officer in First National Bank’s chief risk office, who was speaking to TechCentral on the TCS+ tech show.
Nasila, who has a PhD in mathematical statistics and who is an alumni of Singularity University’s executive development programme, was named as the Corinium Global Intelligence 2020 Global Top 100 Innovators in data and analytics. He is one of the leading thinkers on AI in South Africa.
In this episode of TCS+, Nasila unpacks:
Why businesses in South Africa should care about AI
Why companies can’t ignore AI, and why every firm need an AI strategy – and sooner rather than later
The key building blocks when it comes to developing an AI strategy
How an AI strategy can help a business achieve its goals
What FNB is doing in the AI space and why – including a look at its AI literacy programme
Where AI is going to take the world – and business – in the coming years
* The impact of AI on jobs – should we be concerned?
Don’t miss this fascinating discussion with a leading thinker in the field. TechCentral
JSE-listed retailer Woolworths is moving to replace its fleet of fossil fuel-burning logistics and delivery vehicles with fully electric alternatives.
To discuss the project, and more, Duncan McLeod is joined on the TechCentral Show (TCS) by Ndia Magadagela, co-founder and CEO of South African EV-as-a-service (EVaaS) start-up Everlectric.
Everlectric, through Woolworths’ logistics partner DSV, is deploying electric panel vans to help the retailer reduce its carbon emissions.
The new vans have a 300km range from fully charged and feature “live advanced telematics” that helps improve the efficiency of the vehicles – from managing the top speed (they are governed to 120km/h) to the maximum power output.
In this episode of TCS, Magadagela talks about the Woolworths project, and why she believes the EVaaS model is suited to the local market. She also talks about:
•Her and her co-founders’ backgrounds, and how Everlectric got its start.
•The proofs of concept that the company has run.
•The logistics behind managing in an EV fleet in a country plagued by load shedding – and why it nevertheless still makes sense.
•Learnings from the Woolworths project and how it fits into the retailer’s objective to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2040.
•How the internet of things helps Everlectric manage its fleet.
•Everlectric’s scale-up plans over the next three to five years.
It’s a fascinating interview … don’t miss it! TechCentral
The African SAP User Group (AFSUG) is a community-driven, non-profit organisation independent of SAP that represent the interests of SAP customers and partners in Africa. It does this by providing a platform to share stories, best practices and insights related to their experiences with SAP technology, assisting SAP users to address their key challenges in the African context.
Africa trails other regions in terms of digital adoption and maturity. There are many reasons for this, including poor internet infrastructure and coverage, lack of trust in digital service providers, and a lack of digital and general technology skills. African companies must also overcome a myriad internal factors that contribute to low digital maturity, including cultural resistance to adopting digital tools, a lack of organisational agility required to adopt digital tools effectively, and underdeveloped technology capabilities.
Despite these wide digital gaps and other challenges, there is clearly a desire to catch up to the rest of the world, and digital adoption and the associated infrastructure buildouts are occurring faster in Africa than in other regions.
Through events, forums and networking opportunities, AFSUG allows SAP customers and partners from diverse industries across Africa to engage around these challenges and to exchange ideas to address them, accelerating successful business implementations. Aside from unlimited access to like-minded professionals, resources and education, a further benefit for AFSUG members is being able to influence SAP’s direction in Africa and globally.
Saphila 2023
Saphila, meaning “Alive”, is AFSUG’s world-class biennial African conference, hosted in collaboration with SAP, and is making its post-pandemic comeback from 9-11 July 2023 at the Sun City resort in South Africa’s North West province. This year’s Saphila conference will also be the first-ever hybrid Saphila event, further extending the agenda to delegates who may not be able to travel to or within South Africa.
Saphila 2023 is an opportunity for attendees, both in-person and those attending virtually, to connect, create and collaborate through knowledge sharing about innovations, implementation and service delivery best practices while being exposed to local customer testimonials and panel discussions covering eight different content streams – from platform & tech, transformation and human experience management to the future, next-gen services and more.
Several world-class keynote speakers and top industry experts have been lined up to speak at the event, promising to deliver a content-rich learning experience. Additionally, the conference promises to deliver an all-encompassing immersive environment through providing access to exhibition spaces packed with SAP partners showcasing their solutions on implementing projects faster, better and within a cost-effective budget, as well as new product showcases and demonstrations presented by SAP and SAP partners.
While virtual attendees may not be able to visit the physical partner exhibition, they will still be able to enjoy access to the Saphila 2023 virtual expo centre, which includes online booths for all exhibitors. They will also have the opportunity to participate in interactive sessions and live surveys.
In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+ show, Louise Steenekamp, head of IT at Aspen Pharmacare -- speaking in her capacity as a board member of the African SAP User Group – unpacks what to expect at the upcoming Saphila 2023 event.
The Saphila 2023 agenda is now live and can be accessed by visiting saphila2023.com/agenda. For more information and assistance with general event information and bookings, please send a message to info@SAPHILA2023.co.za. TechCentral
It’s been eight months since Werner Kapp took the reins from Mteto Nyati at Altron. Now firmly in his new role, Kapp joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to unpack his strategy for the storied JSE-listed technology group.
Kapp, who previously led Dimension Data, talks about Altron’s financial results for the year ended 28 February 2023 and how, despite the rotten economy, it still managed to produce revenue growth of 19%.
In the interview, Kapp unpacks:
•His strategy for Altron – and why he’s focusing on the areas he is;
•Which parts of Altron have him particularly excited;
•Value-unlock opportunities for Netstar and other operating companies;
•The role played by Altron investor Value Capital Partners;
•The plans for Altron Document Solutions;
•The opportunities and challenges facing Altron Karabina, Altron Systems Integration and Altron Security;
•The impact of load shedding on Altron; and
•Why he’s still cautiously optimistic about South Africa’s future.
Don’t miss the interview! TechCentral
This year is set to be a difficult one for customer experience (CX) professionals as entities in every sector struggle to focus on customers while staying afloat in turbulent economic times.
CX teams will need to transform, and those that can help their companies achieve their brand goals and aspirations will thrive despite shrinking corporate budgets. To do this, they need data, as it is the cornerstone of any successful CX strategy and is integral to boosting brand loyalty and advocacy.
To unpack the importance of data for business improvements, TechCentral last week hosted an episode of the TCS+ technology show that brought together experts in the field of data analytics.
TCS+ host Yaliwe Soko spoke to Frank Sherlock, vice president of international operations at CallMiner, and explored how businesses can leverage data to improve their operations, enhance customer experience and drive growth.
It emerged in the interview that data is essential for making better business decisions. Sherlock emphasised that data provides valuable insights into customers’ needs, preferences and behaviours. By leveraging data analytics tools, businesses can harness this information to optimise their products, services and operations.
Moreover, Sherlock discussed how CX is a crucial element of business success. CallMiner highlighted the importance of using data to improve customer experience, citing examples of how businesses can use customer feedback and sentiment analysis to identify pain points and deliver personalised experiences.
Data governance and security are critical, Sherlock said, and stressed the importance of implementing robust data governance policies and security measures to protect customer data and comply with regulatory requirements.
Finally, he said the human element is still crucial in data analytics. Despite the increasing prevalence of automated analytics tools, human judgment and expertise are still necessary for interpreting data and making informed business decisions.
Overall, the interview provides valuable insights into the importance of data for business improvement. Businesses that can harness the power of data analytics will gain a competitive advantage by making better decisions, enhancing customer experience and driving revenue growth.
However, data governance and security are critical considerations, and human judgment and expertise remain key to effective data analytics. TechCentral
Open Africa Data Centres (OADC), part of the Wiocc Group, recently completed a new data centre build in Isando, east of Johannesburg, and internet service provider Cipherwave has already become an anchor tenant in the facility.
To discuss the data centre build, and Cipherwave’s decision to deploy its infrastructure there, Duncan McLeod is joined on TechCentral’s TCS+ by Darren Bedford, group chief development officer at Wiocc Group, and by Wayne D’Sa, CEO of Cipherwave.
To kick off a lively discussion, Bedford unpacks Wiocc Group’s move into data centres, what OADC has achieved in its first year in business, and the investments the company has already made in facilities, not only in South Africa but elsewhere on the continent.
Bedford also chats about OADC’s landing of the Meta Platforms-backed 2Africa internet cable system at Amanzimtoti, south of Durban, and what’s involved in bringing these systems ashore.
He talks, too, about why OADC is also investing heavily in edge data centres, and why these are important in the local context.
The conversation then shifts to OADC’s Isando data centre and what was involved in constructing it (and in record time).
D’Sa explains why Cipherwave decided to partner with OADC, and what was involved in moving its servers and other data centre infrastructure to the new facility.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion! TechCentral
Planetworld, a distributor of audio gear from brands such as Sonos and Shure, has proven that there is still strong demand among South African consumers for specialist audio.
The company, which was founded by four brothers, has built a strong niche in the audio market, led by Sonos, but also representing brands such as JVC, Kenwood, Cambridge Audio, Alpine, Pioneer, Onkyo and Savant.
Planetworld co-founder, director and CEO Maurice van Heerden – one of the four Van Heerden brothers – joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) to chat about the history of the company, including:
•The 2008 acquisition of Planet Electronics, which formed the basis on what became Planetworld.
•The 2017 acquisition of Audiotronic, which brought the Sonos, Polk Audio, Onkyo and Dali brands to the stable.
•What it’s like going into business with siblings – and why it worked so well for Planetworld.
•Why Sonos has changed the world of audio, and why Planetworld believes there is still a huge market opportunity for the brand in South Africa.
In the TCS interview, Van Heerden also chats about the state of the economy and the impact – or not – that this has had on high-end audio sales.
Lastly, he unveils details about Planetworld’s new initiative, Rockstar Studios.
Don’t miss a great discussion! TechCentral
For years, Cell C was the only game in town for brands wanting to launch a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). That’s changing -- fast -- and now MTN has said it is positioning itself as the “go-to network backbone partner” in South Africa.
MTN South Africa wholesale executive Quintus de Beer joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) to unpack in detail what this plan means for other network carriers and prospective MVNO players.
De Beer said MTN wants to be the “network of choice” for the wholesale market by 2025, even as rivals Vodacom and Telkom gear up to launch MVNO enablement platforms of their own -- in line with the requirements set out in last year’s broadband spectrum auction.
Already, both Telkom and Cell C both roam on MTN's infrastructure, with a number of MVNOs also launching on the operator’s network, including Pick n Pay’s PnP Mobile and Afrihost’s Air Mobile -- with more to be announced soon, according to De Beer.
In this episode of TCS, De Beer chats about:
Why wholesale is so important to MTN
MTN’s relationship with Cell C and Telkom
The MVNOs on MTN’s network
What’s involved in supporting MVNOs
The market size for MVNOs
Why it took so long for MVNOs to take off in South Africa
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion. TechCentral
Muggie van Staden is CEO of one of South Africa's largest and oldest open-source software companies, Obsidian Systems. But ask him what he runs on his desktop, and he'll you it's a Mac. And he recently moved to it from ... Microsoft Windows.
Van Staden says his desktop computing choices are based on the fact that he's not particularly technical, and prefers the relative ease of use of both Windows and macOS.
Indeed, many of the non-technical staff at Obsidian run Windows PCs or Macs, while the company's developers tend to prefer either macOS or Linux.
That Linux hasn't succeeded in displacing Microsoft and Apple on the desktop, against the fervent wishes of many open-source software fans, doesn't worry Van Staden, who points out in this interview on the TechCentral Show (TCS) that Linux and open-source software have won everywhere else - on servers, in the data centre and on phones (Android).
In this episode of TCS, Van Staden chats about:
How Obsidian got its start;
The relevance of open-source software in the modern computing world;
Why Linux has never become popular on the desktop and whether it will ever be anything more than a niche on PCs;
Why Microsoft should no longer be seen as the enemy of the open-source community, and why the community should not distrust the company's motives in its embrace of Linux and other open-source software; and
* The role of open-source software in enterprise computing in South Africa.
Don't miss a great discussion! TechCentral
South African Internet entrepreneur Calvin Collett is launching his latest venture, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Melon Mobile, next week, hoping to lure customers looking for a simpler proposition for their telecommunications needs.
Collett joined TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) on Thursday to unpack the new company’s plans.
Melon Mobile, which will be launched officially next Thursday, piggybacks off MTN South Africa’s network and offers a full range of connectivity solutions, including voice, data and text messages.
Customers can choose exactly how much data, voice or SMSes they want upfront using sliders, offering them the sort of granularity that’s not available from the big network operators. Collett, speaking on TCS, explained that Melon Mobile has worked to remove the inefficiencies associated with subscribing to mobile services.
In the interview, Collett, who previously headed the MTN-owned Internet service provider Supersonic, talks about:
•Why the MVNO market in South Africa is mushrooming;
•Why Melon Mobile chose MTN as its network partner;
•Melon Mobile’s prices, and the company’s pricing strategy;
•The company’s target market and the market opportunity; and
•What its next moves are after launch.
Don’t miss the interview – and if you enjoy it, please subscribe to TechCentral’s tech shows on YouTube, Spotify and elsewhere (see details below). TechCentral
Jan-Jan Bezuidenhout, CEO of MetroFibre Networx, believes fibre network operators (FNOs) in South Africa will soon find a way to deliver fibre broadband profitably into underserviced areas.
Speaking on the TechCentral Show (TCS), Bezuidenhout – who replaced former Absa boss Steve Booysen as CEO of MetroFibre in mid-2022 – said he is confident a solution to the challenge of delivering fibre affordably into these areas will be forthcoming.
MetroFibre and other FNOs are actively testing models for deploying fibre broadband into townships and even into informal settlements.
In this episode of TCS, Bezuidenhout speaks about:
The state of the fibre broadband market in South Africa;
The history of MetroFibre, including its investment rounds;
Consolidation in the fibre infrastructure industry – and the role MetroFibre might play in that consolidation; and
MetroFibre’s recent aggressive price cuts and line speed increases – why the company did it, and what it hopes to achieve.
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
Clive Butkow is one of South Africa’s leading experts on venture capital investment in technology start-ups.
The founder and CEO of Kalon Venture Partners joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) to chat about why the VC investment business has changed radically, especially since the world, led by the US Federal Reserve, started hiking interest rates last year to tame inflation.
Monetary tightening has meant the end of “easy money” and the need by start-ups to focus not on where their next funding round is coming from – it might not even happen in this environment, Butkow says – to managing cash flows and ensuring financial sustainability.
He provides advice to entrepreneurs as to what they should be doing differently to survive the current economic headwinds. For those wanting to start their own ventures, but who haven’t yet done so, he provides insight into the key issues they should be considering before setting out. Also, what are the biggest mistakes start-ups make? Butkow unpacks the key ones in this discussion.
Butkow, a former chief operating officer of Accenture South Africa, quit his day job 10 years ago to found Kalon Venture Partners, which has made several highly successful investments in South African tech start-ups over the years. Kalon’s new fund is now looking at investments elsewhere on the continent, too, seeking to take advantage of growth in the start-up ecosystems in countries such as Kenya and Nigeria.
In this episode of TCS, Butkow talks about the South African Revenue Service’s Section 12J incentive scheme, which drove investments in a large number of start-ups but which has now come to an end. He reflects on the impact that Section 12J had, and what else Sars – and government – could be doing to stimulate start-ups and small businesses.
Don’t miss a fascinating interview! TechCentral
When Dutch colleagues and business partners Lars Veul and Derk Hoekert came to South Africa on assignment with e-commerce marketplace Groupon in 2012, they soon realised there was a problem: up to 30% of local online orders were not getting delivered.
This was due to various reasons, including consumers not being at home at time of delivery, office premises being difficult for couriers to access and difficulties associated with couriers making deliveries in areas without proper addresses, including in townships.
So, the entrepreneurially minded pair quit their jobs at Groupon and started Pargo in 2015 in an effort to solve the last-mile logistics headaches facing e-commerce businesses in South Africa.
“We spent two years trying to figure out the real problems,” Veul says in this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS).
The result was a sharp focus on the click-and-collect model and establishing partnerships with thousands of retail stores, allowing consumers to send and receive orders — and return items — over the counter, with a human being providing assistance.
Pargo, which doesn’t operate its own fleet of vehicles – preferring to partner instead with courier companies – now has plans to expand into new markets. In this TCS interview, Veul unpacks what comes next for Pargo.
He also chats about whether the South African Post Office could ever reinvent itself as an e-commerce player, or whether the state-owned postal service is a lost cause.
Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral
MTN South Africa hosted a media event in Soweto on Thursday to demonstrate to journalists the severe impact that criminal vandalism is having on its base stations.
In this interview, conducted at the site of an MTN base station in Mofolo South in Soweto, the company's chief technology and information officer, Michele Gamberini, tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the attacks taking place on its high sites and how it's fighting back.
MTN disclosed that it will spend at least R1.5-billion this year at it moves to secure its network against both severe load shedding and vandalism.
Gamberini said MTN will use the R1.5-billion allocated to building resilience in its network - protecting its infrastructure from vandals and deploying thousands of additional batteries to ensure its sites remain operational during extended power outages.
Gamberini said that in the past year there have been more than 400 unique attacks on its tower infrastructure in the Eastern Cape alone. Some sites have been hit as many as 15 times, he said.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Gamberini unpacks the impact of the vandalism and power cuts on its ability to service its clients. He also talks about how the company is working with law enforcement in an effort to address the problem, which is affecting all industry players. TechCentral
The software development process has evolved dramatically in recent years to keep up with the growing demand for delivering high-quality software in the fastest time possible.
Unfortunately, in the past security was often tacked on as an afterthought and testing only happened towards the end of the life cycle.
And in a world where threats are consistently evolving and becoming more sophisticated, this way of doing things was riddled with issues, leading the industry to realise that a new approach was needed.
Shifting left
TechCentral’s TCS+ show host James Erasmus spoke to Barry de Waal, co-owner and chief executive for strategy and sales at 9th BIT Consulting, and Hilbert Long GM of Sales for the Emea region at CYBER1 Solutions, to unpack a trend that emerged to address this challenge: “shift left”.
The “shift left” approach aims to improve software quality and cut the time spent resolving issues later in the software development cycle by seeing testing performed as code is being developed. This helps to identify and resolve bugs as early as possible in the development process.
In De Waal’s words, this approach means getting siloed activities that typically end up happening later on in the software development life cycle brought forward to take better control of what needs to be delivered.
According to Long, CYBER1 Solutions has seen development teams in organisations pulling in security teams more often. “That in itself is creating a ‘shift left’ component, because cyber teams were always the last to be pulled into the life cycle from a development perspective.”
This, he says, is one reason why CYBER1 Solutions Emea has created a partnership with 9th BIT Consulting.
Input from everybody
De Waal, adds that with a shift left approach, it’s not just the security that’s being pulled in earlier on in the life cycle. “It’s also the testing and the infrastructure that needs to be put together. Quite often you will have teams whose only priority is getting their features list out. And inevitably, down the line, it takes a lot longer -- if there is an issue with security, or infrastructure provisioning, or cloud infrastructure -- to go back and have to refactor the features that need fixing.”
So, what do these changes mean on a practical level? According to De Waal and Long, this means that everyone needs to contribute to the planning and give input into the design. Testing starts and finishes in the development environment, and developers become testers as much as internal auditing team members become planners.
The impact of this logic, according to De Waal, is huge. “People need to redefine what they contribute to their organisation. Moreover, they need to redefine their skill set and the job titles that have pigeon-holed them for so long. Multi-functional people with a breadth of skills results in greater accountability, more responsibility, more knowledge sharing, and fewer bottlenecks or points of failure.”
De Waal also warns that existing and future employees are going to have to review their skill sets to become more dynamic, adaptable and agile.
Critical thinking
Because “shift left” means testing earlier on, it helps developers think critically and get a handle on security requirements while designing software securely from the start. De Waal says this means more focus needs to be given to continuously improving one’s processes, automating what can be automated and, most importantly, getting the culture right to achieve all of this.
De Waal also says we can expect to see leadership setting the example, implementing change, and expecting all functions to enhance the cadence of delivery through the development cycle and into the production domain.
In ending, Long says CYBER1 Solutions Emea is expanding across numerous territories and will support the security enablement of numerous companies across industries, with a strong leaning towards building business ag TechCentral
Africa is by no means going to be left behind in technology and connectivity, according to chip developer MediaTek.
5G, it believes, is going to revolutionise the capabilities of mobile handsets, drive home automation and bring feature-rich capabilities to our vehicles.
In this episode of TCS+, TechCentral’s James Erasmus spoke to Rami Osman, director for corporate sales and marketing at MediaTek Middle East and Africa, for insight into this topic and more.
Osman talks about the ubiquity of the mobile phone, but also about how he and his team are supporting the local telecommunications industry, including mobile network operators and infrastructure providers, as it works to cater for growing demand for reliable, high-speed connectivity.
Don’t miss the discussion.
* TCS+ episodes are paid for by the party concerned TechCentral
The PC industry has been through a boom-and-bust cycle in the past few years, with demand first spiking higher due to Covid and work-from-home measures, only to fall back as people returned to the office.
Despite this, there’s plenty happening in the PC space, including interesting experimentation with new form factors, including dual-screen laptops.
Lenovo, the world’s biggest PC maker, recently took the lid off its latest computing devices at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The company’s head of the Southern African region, Yugen Naidoo, joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to talk about these new products, but also to unpack the state of the industry.
In this episode of TCS, Naidoo chats about:
•The impact of Covid on the industry, and why demand remains strong in the corporate segment, even as consumers take strain;
•The importance of innovation, even in a mature market;
•New form factors for PCs, and what’s coming next;
•Lenovo’s smartphone offerings, and whether we could see the company’s Motorola phones reintroduced into the South African market; and
•The launch of Lenovo’s ThinkPhone.
Don’t miss the discussion. TechCentral
TCS+ | The need for speed: Braintree's Heath Huxtable on modern IT infrastructure
The need to deploy servers and supporting software applications hasn’t changed, but the way these deployments are done has.
The days when teams of highly skilled consultants and technicians entered a customer’s environment and made a slew of changes are over.
It’s clear that enterprises are looking for ways to deploy their IT infrastructure remotely and quickly, which has resulted in a fast transition from on-premises to cloud (or a combination of the two), faster time to market and a more rapid return on investment.
Heath Huxtable, executive head at Braintree (Vox, part of Vivica Holdings), says it is important to take all stakeholders, including end users, along for the journey, which leads to a more engaged and empowered client.
Huxtable joined host James Erasmus on TechCentral’s TCS+ show to share his advice on alleviating the concerns many executives have about shifting to the cloud.
Huxtable talks about many practical implications and cited numerous industries where the change from on-premises servers to the cloud can be deployed, not only remotely, but also with a very flexible and scalable architecture.
This reduces “bill shock” and softens the impact of the overused and feared word “change”, he says.
Speed has become the lifeblood of businesses worldwide and, as new technologies evolve, so does the need for more efficient and rapid deployment in the most cost-effective manner possible.
Braintree assists companies in meeting their infrastructure needs quickly, without the slow and capital-intensive process of building company-owned infrastructure.
The company’s rapid server deployment is not based on a one-size-fits-all approach, but rather looks at each customer’s requirements to ensure a solution that works for them. This, in turn, allays fears customers may have when embracing new technologies. TechCentral
Robert Brine, director of Cyber & Intelligence Solutions at Mastercard in Southern Africa, joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to talk about security in the global payments industry.
Brine tells TechCentral’s Duncan McLeod about the security challenges in the fintech and financial services space, and what consumers and businesses need to know to protect themselves.
In this episode of TCS, Brine unpacks what exactly it is that companies like Mastercard do before detailing the work that Mastercard is doing to secure its platforms from attackers.
He also chats about the impact on consumer behaviour of the Covid-19 pandemic, and what consumers could be doing to better secure themselves when shopping online.
Brine touches on the history of payments technology from the early days of the credit card to modern tap-to-pay solutions.
Lastly, he unpacks what Mastercard is doing in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, and looks at whether a blockchain-based approach to global settlements makes sense. TechCentral
Having been at the vanguard of the fintech movement in South Africa, Trustlink is rebranding and repositioning itself as two independent businesses, now called Omnea and Tegra. With this move, the company aims to become omnicompetent, omnipresent and omnichannel with a focused approach for each business entity.
Dr Philip Tromp, founder and chairman of Xea Capital, and Deon Tromp, CEO of Omnea, joined TechCentral’s TCS Impact Series show to delve into the history of Omnea, as well as the strategy for the immediate future.
Dr Tromp has more than 25 years of experience in payment systems innovation, both in South Africa and abroad. In the 1990s, as GM of business systems and technology at the South African Reserve Bank, he led an industry initiative to modernise the South African National Payment System.
This ground-breaking exercise introduced, amongst other things, a real-time payment system (Samos) between South African banks. The project also resulted in the promulgation of the first South African National Payment System Act and a self-regulating structure (the Payments Association of South Africa) to regulate the payments industry and open up competition in the provision of payment services to non-banks.
Deon Tromp has also enjoyed a long and varied career in financial services, with expertise in compliance, credit, risk management and capital management. During his career, he has conceptualised, designed, built and implemented methodologies, processes and systems to address complex risk management and regulatory challenges. He was also a member of the Financial Services Conduct Authority’s steering committee responsible for the development and implementation of the Solvency Assessment and Management (SAM) supervisory approach for prudential regulation.
With their and their team’s combined expertise and focus on adhering to regulatory and compliance measures, Omnea is well-positioned to enable the financial services industry from a back-office automation perspective, right through to the development of frontend payment applications.
Omnea, they said in this episode of TCS Impact Series, is also levelling the playing field for fintech through an open digital platform. Their position as a “TechFin” enables them to provide the market with access to the best of financial services and the lowest negotiated rates, agnostic to all traditional banking systems in the market through the technology and software they have developed and integrated since inception. As a trusted partner and leading fintech advisory, they are currently enabling over 450 000 individuals and businesses with payment services across South Africa. They are poised to, in Dr Tromp’s words, “make a real difference to society”.
Financial institutions, large corporates and smaller businesses will all benefit from Omnea’s core tenet -- to provision and enable fair payments across the globe. An important shift in Omnea’s messaging is that it is a TechFin and sees itself as a modern brand offering modern solutions to non-traditional financial services providers to enter the payment space.
Watch or listen below to a fascinating conversation between these two fintech leaders.
About Omnea
Omnea forms part of XEA Capital group and provides businesses with access to secure and reliable payment platforms across Africa.
Founded in 1999, Omnea – formerly known as Trustlink – spearheaded the fintech movement by being the first TechFin business in Africa to provide enablement services and integrations to support their customers’ growth in the fintech Industry.
Over 20 years later, we are now a trusted payment partner and leading fintech advisory in Africa that enables over 450 000 individuals and businesses with payment services. At Omnea, we believe that TechFin is the catalyst for growth in Africa, and by enabling the fintech indu... TechCentral
Rifling through filing cabinets in search of the one critical file that has brought your business to a standstill is an arduous and painful task that nobody enjoys.
Fortunately, those days are over. Ricoh South Africa is now an expert in the field of electronic records management.
In addition, the company was recently awarded membership status of the exclusive DocuWare Diamond Club in recognition of its exceptional performance. This included having exceeded revenue targets through client onboarding, growth, satisfaction and retention.
DocuWare is document management software that automates business processes and workflows by electronically managing and sharing documents irrespective of their format or source.
TechCentral’s James Erasmus was joined in-studio by Marcell Otto, digital services product manager at Ricoh South Africa, who delved into the ways DocuWare solves the document management challenges that local businesses face today.
In the episode of TCS Impact Series, Otto discussed how using DocuWare can help entities of every size, and across all verticals, connect their documents and people from anywhere.
In fact, 80% of DocuWare’s clients are cloud based, so the solution delivers smart digital workflow and document control that streamlines business performance and boosts productivity. Ultimately, he revealed how DocuWare facilitates more efficient use of resources and reduces human error. Through preconfigured tools, it can digitally transform the way organisations capture, process and access content from day one.
Watch or listen to the interview as Otto and his team at Ricoh take you through a journey of modernisation.
TechCentral on Tuesday broke the news about Toco, a new payments platform and associated digital currency, toco, backed by the founder of Vumatel.
Now Toco CEO Paul Rowett joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to chat about the project, which aims to fight climate change by “fixing the current economic model so it places a value on the environment”.
Read all the details about the launch of Toco and its digital currency on TechCentral, but in short, each unit of toco in circulation is represented by a carbon mitigation asset which is held and owned centrally by a Swiss-regulated entity called The Carbon Reserve.
The Carbon Reserve is an independent non-profit foundation responsible for toco issuance, purchases and custody of the carbon assets. It is mandated to maintain the convertibility of tocos to carbon assets and to grow the toco supply and expand the voluntary carbon market.
Founded by Rowett with Vumatel co-founders Niel Schoeman and Johan “Joe” Pretorius, Toco has also drawn early-stage investment from venture capitalist and former FNB CEO Michael Jordaan.
In this episode of TCS, Rowett unpacks the ideas behind Toco, how he partnered with Schoeman and Pretorius to launch the venture, and why they chose Stellenbosch to pilot the project.
The founders want to use the platform and currency to help save the planet. Rowett sets out in this TCS interview how exactly the company intends to do that. Don’t miss the discussion!
Naked Insurance, the South African digital insurance start-up, announced earlier on Wednesday that it has secured US$17-million (R306-milliomn at the time of writing) in a series-B funding round.
Alex Thomson, Naked’s CEO and a co-founder of the company, joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) to unpack the investment, which includes funding from the International Finance Corporation and German development finance house DEG.
Described by Naked as “one of the largest-ever African insurtech funding rounds”, Thomson reveals in this episode of TCS what the company plans to use the money to do.
He also discusses why the insurance industry was ripe for disruption and how Naked uses artificial intelligence tools to reduce dramatically the need for call centre agents and to drive up efficiencies in the applications and claims processes.
Don’t miss the discussion!
Unreliable power supply due to excessive load shedding has most South Africans worried about the future. However, every consumer can make a difference by using technology.
For example, automation can make the job of managing and saving energy less expensive and arduous. Similarly, making use of the internet of things (IoT), machine learning and managed services can also have a positive impact on any business’s energy usage.
Guardian Eye, a monitoring technology leader, offers cloud-based managed services that address organisations’ energy requirements. TechCentral spoke with Rodney Taylor, the company’s MD, about how its consultation services have guided large enterprises, particularly those in the retail space, but also entities from a wide range of industries.
Guardian Eye offers assessments, gap analyses and energy consumption forecasting to get to the root of customers’ energy challenges. All these actions help businesses learn how they can use technology to optimise their energy consumption patterns.
As a data-led organisation, Guardian Eye helps customers monitor workflows on Web or mobile apps, helping them to anticipate equipment failure before it becomes a problem.
In addition, the company’s platform monitors valuable assets against the risk of theft and damage. In many instances, pre-emptive warning signals are automatically triggered and sent directly to the security companies to act on.
The message is clear: energy today is a luxury, and we all need to be smart about how we manage it. If you want to use energy more efficiently and effectively, this conversation is worth your time.
Guardian Eye - your gateway to integrated, intelligent, informed and improved living. A Vivica Holdings Company.
* TCS Impact Series episodes are paid for by the party concerned
Convergence Partners CEO Brandon Doyle joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) to unpack the recently announced closing, at $296-million (R5.3-billion), of the private equity company’s new Digital Infrastructure Fund.
Convergence Partners, which is chaired by well-known South African technology investor and entrepreneur Andile Ngcaba, unpacks what the fund – which surpassed its initial targeted fundraising amount by 18% -- intends to use the money for.
The new fund is Convergence Partners’ largest to date and brings total funds under management to about $600-million.
In this episode of TCS, Doyle chats about Convergence Partners’ investment philosophy and unpacks some of the bigger investments made by the company since its founding in 2006.
He also provides details about the sort of investments the company is hoping to make through its new fund and why.
Lastly, Doyle talks about the state of venture capital and private equity funding in Africa, especially in an environment of high inflation and rapidly rising interest rates, and what that means for technology investment on the continent.
Don’t miss a fascinating discussion!
Tim Humphries-Davies, CEO of Alviva Holdings-owned technology distributor Pinnacle, believes the worst of the supply-chain challenges that afflicted the global and local tech industries in recent years is largely over.
Speaking on the TechCentral Show (TCS), Humphries-Davies explains that although there are still some challenges in the networking space, the chip shortages that affected the PC industry have been resolved.
He unpacks how Pinnacle, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, weathered the storm, and how the current slump in PC sales is affecting the industry.
In this episode of TCS, Humphries-Davies also chats about:
•The imminent delisting of Alviva Holdings and what that means for Pinnacle;
•Consolidation in the distribution market, including Alviva’s recent acquisition of Tarsus Technology Group, and what it means for the local industry;
•How Pinnacle and sister companies Axiz and Tarsus compete (and sometimes cooperate) with each other, and why it’s unlikely that the companies will be merged; and
•The big technology trends of 2023, including the emergence of generative artificial intelligence.
Don’t miss the discussion!
AfriForum, the vocal Afrikaner civil rights organisation, wants to deploy pebble-bed modular nuclear reactors (PBMRs) in South African communities to help solve the country’s crippling energy woes. But why PBMRs? And how will the project work exactly?
It might seem strange for a non-governmental organisation like AfriForum to want to involve itself in electricity generation, but the move makes perfect sense, argues Johan Kruger, its head of community independence. This is especially so as the state is failing to provide basic services like electricity, necessitating the involvement of private capital.
Kruger joined TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Studio (TCS) – previously, TC|Daily – to discuss AfriForum’s plans. (Watch or listen to the interview below.)
In the show, Kruger unpacks how AfriForum wants to help homeowners and businesses extricate themselves from the Eskom mess by deploying their own power generation systems, including rooftop solar.
In the longer term, the organisation hopes to work with the private sector to reduce or entirely eliminate communities’ dependence on the state for electricity supply.
Kruger explains that the government’s inability to provide not only electricity reliably, but also water and other basic services, means that many of these will be offered in future by the private sector or by communities themselves working with private entities.
Rapport and City Press reported on 22 January that AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel was engaging with André Pienaar, a South African businessman and founder and CEO of C5 Capital – a venture capital firm that invests in companies focused on space, cybersecurity and nuclear energy – about deploying PBMRs in South Africa.
C5 Capital is an investor in X-Energy, a US company whose staff includes senior South African nuclear scientists. X-energy is taking forward some of the pioneering work into PBMRs that was done on South African soil before government withdrew its funding for the project in 2010.
In this episode of TCS, Kruger unpacks the South African origin of the PBMR technology and what an AfriForum-supported deployment of modular reactors into communities might look like.
Don’t miss this fascinating interview!
Amid intense disruption in recent years, cybercrime has skyrocketed as attackers continue, and even ramp up, their schemes in times of crisis. And as the threat landscape evolves, cybersecurity solutions need to evolve, too.
Concurrently, while C-level executives’ minds are used to looking at things through a business lens, this isn’t the case for cybersecurity leaders, whose approach tends to focus more narrowly on technical objectives.
However, security professionals need to support the business and enable it to do what it needs to do to succeed. At the same time, they must protect the organisation from the confidentiality, integrity, availability and legal impacts of a breach that could prevent the business from achieving its strategic goals.
This means that today’s chief information security officers need to wear many hats. Hyperconnected workplaces mean CISOs need to be mediators, investigators and highly tech-savvy individuals, too. Most importantly, they need to stop being enforcers, and start being influencers, and do this while ensuring their organisation isn’t the latest target of an attack.
In today’s podcast, we delved into how all of the leaders need to work together to drive a culture of collaboration and prevention, instead of viewing each other as opponents across the boardroom. Doing this successfully will result in a better flow of communication and greater transparency among all stakeholders, resulting in stronger defences and reduced exposure to risks.
This was the at the heart of our conversation with Cyber1 Solutions and Next DLP.
The conversation inevitably turned to the security skills and tools that are needed to protect organisations both large and small. It became clear that for any cybersecurity strategy to be effective, it needs to be delivered by people with deep knowledge and expertise. These people need to understand how to manage vulnerabilities and build cybersecurity strategies that are backed by real threat intelligence and use the right technology at the right time to make a real difference to the business.
Our guests in this episode of TCS Impact Series are Jayson O’Reilly, MD at Cyber1 Solutions, Troy Gabel, chief revenue officer for Next DLP, and Fallon Steyn, regional sales manager for the Middle East and Africa for Next DLP.
Don’t miss this information discussion!
Huawei Technologies has officially launched its flagship Mate50 Pro smartphone in South Africa, and the company’s Akhram Mohamed is in the studio to tell TechCentral’s audience all about it.
Mohamed, who is vice president of operations at Huawei Consumer Business Group South Africa, unpacks the key features of the Mate50 Pro, including its Ultra Aperture XMAGE camera system and Kunlun Glass, which greatly enhances screen drop resistance – and we put it to the test rather dramatically in this episode of TCS Impact Series.
The smartphone, available through network operators or the Huawei online store, features a distinctive new “Space Ring” design for the rear camera system and comes in two different types of rear cover: silver or black glass, or a premium orange vegan leather.
And, no, thanks to US sanctions on China, there is no official Google Mobile Services support for the phone – but Mohamed explains in the interview why it’s now easy to get access to Google apps and services thanks to Huawei’s partnership with GBox.
Other key features of the new Mate50 Pro include:
•IP68-rated water resistance;
•6.74-inch Huawei FullView Display with a screen resolution of 2 616x1 212 pixels and a refresh rate of 120Hz to reduce flickering and eye fatigue;
•A 4 700mAh battery, despite a slim-body design;
•66W fast-charging via cable or 50W ireless fast-charging; and
•Low-battery Emergency Mode that activates when the battery level falls to 1%, with SuperEnergy Boosting that allows the Mate50 Pro to extend standby time by three hours, or 12 minutes of call time.
The Huawei Mate50 Pro is available in South Africa from all network providers and is priced from R24 999 for the 256GB and R26 999 for the 512GB version.
In the final TC|Daily interview of 2022, Duncan McLeod is joined in the TechCentral studio by +OneX founder Rob Godlonton for a wide-ranging discussion on the company and the South African IT sector more broadly.
Godlonton tells McLeod about his career history, including the 10 years between 2009 and 2019 he spent in senior management at EOH Holdings.
Godlonton, who EOH CEO Stephen van Coller said at the time of his (Godlonton's) departure that he was in no way implicated in the malfeasance that took place at the company, shares his views on what went wrong.
In the interview, Godlonton also talks about:
Why he returned to South Africa after a career abroad.
Where the idea for +OneX came from and how it became part of the JSE-listed Reunert.
+OneX's strategy, and where it's positioned in the market.
The company's acquisitions, and why it's still on the hunt for deals (even big ones).
Don't miss the discussion!
TC|Daily shows will return in mid-January. TechCentral wishes its readers a pleasant Christmas and New Year break and all the best for 2023.
Although it’s not easy to predict the year ahead, one thing is certain: cybercrime will become more prevalent and will, if it’s not already, become a risk agenda for company boards.
Anna Collard, senior vice president of content strategy and evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa, recently attended the World Economic Forum’s annual security meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, where she met with some of the world’s leading authorities in the tech space.
As a global influencer and expert in this field, she brings a wealth of knowledge and insight into what we should all be more aware of. Vigilance, she says in this Impact Series episode, is the name of the game.
Collard explains how important it is to collaborate to prevent security incidents, especially given that organisations are all facing similar adversaries. After all, no business is an island.
Collard reiterates in the show what she has said in previous episodes: the importance of identifying existing and new people in and around your business who demonstrate a promising attitude towards cybersecurity, an attitude that will in turn form valuable skills and help build a digital culture around your organisation’s security needs.
Cybercriminals are limbering up for another year of extortion and ransomware as they seek new ways to hack the world. We don’t need a crystal ball, says Collard. Rather, we need collaboration, vigilance and a focused workforce.
Don’t miss the discussion!
Despite being one of South Africa’s oldest companies – it was founded in 1888 and listed on the JSE in 1948 – Reunert is a picture of health.
The group, which owns assets in engineering, electronics, IT and defence, last month reported a 16% improvement in full-year revenue to 30 September 2022 and a 17% improvement in operating profit – not bad for a company operating in an economy that’s going nowhere slowly.
Reunert CEO Alan Dickson joins TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod in the TC|Daily studio to chat about the group, its origins – it was founded by two immigrants, Theodore Reunert and Otto Lenz – and its storied history. Only two years older than the City of Johannesburg, Reunert was created to serve the needs of the early mining companies on the Reef.
But it has transformed itself many times over in the past 134 years, and it is this innate cultural ability to adapt to change, Dickson says, that has given Reunert its longevity.
The business, which had always had a purely industrial focus, later branched into new business areas, including office automation and telecommunications through brands such as Nashua, Nashua Mobile and, more recently, ECN and SkyWire.
In addition to chatting about Reunert’s history, Dickson also unpacks the group’s strategy under his leadership; why the business is outperforming the rest of the economy; and why he’s bullish about renewable energy and “new-age” IT systems integration.
Lastly, he talks about Reunert’s acquisition strategy, and why the group, which has always had an acquisitive streak, is on the hunt for deals.
Don’t miss a great discussion! – © 2022 NewsCentral Media
Cognitive overload is leading to obvious security vulnerabilities as the wave of cybercrime gets worse. We can’t risk being hacked as a result of being distracted, yet many employees risk making critical mistakes, especially if they are overstressed.
Can we promote a happier, healthier and safer working environment by taking a moment to quieten down, focus and pay attention to our actions.
KnowBe4 Africa's Anna Collard believes we can. She returns to TechCentral’s Impact Series to chat about some of the mindfulness techniques and tools that can help individuals and companies be better prepared to tackle the risks.
As senior vice president of content strategy and evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa, Collard shares her insights into people's susceptibility to social engineering tricks and how to counter them.
Being distracted, and falsely believing we can multitask, is an obvious weakness that is being exploited by attackers, she says.
Don’t miss the discussion, and follow Collard on LinkedIn or visit www.knowbe4.com to learn more.
The constraints on the global and local supply of critical components, compounded by numerous logistics issues, has made 2022 a challenging one for the ICT industry.
Although industry players have made every effort to deliver, when there are no parts there really are no parts!
TechCentral’s Impact Series jumped into conversation with Riaan Graham, sales director of sub-Saharan Africa at Ruckus Networks, and Eugene Botes, product manager at Pinnacle Datanet, for a frank discussion about where the industry’s going headed into 2023.
The good news, Graham and Botes say, is that we are likely to leapfrog certain technologies as an unintended consequence of the supply constraints and that 2023 will be a better year for us all. Not sunshine and roses, but better. Production has realigned with demand; the backlogs in supply chains have eased; and balance is being restored.
An example of an unintended consequence is that companies that had been planning the shift to Wi-Fi 6 may be lucky they had to sit it out. Wi-Fi 6 and 6E (also known as the wireless standard 802.11ax) promised big improvements in wireless Internet speeds. But Wi-Fi 7 is already around the corner, says Graham, promising even more: greater efficiencies in network delivery and wireless transmission, and a greater ability to augment AI and robotic digitisation initiatives. Find out more about Ruckus Networks’ solutions here.
Complemented by numerous peripheral services and efficiencies, such as cloud-managed services and the ability to support the increasing risk of network users wanting to bring their own devices (BYOD) onto enterprise networks safely, Ruckus will specify, develop and deliver Wi-Fi 7 solutions.
Botes emphasises the importance of planning now and applying a well-scoped logic to what ultimately is a unique set of product offerings that Ruckus can provide. Learn more about Pinnacle Datanet and the solutions offered by both Rucks and Datanet in this episode of Impact Series.
* Impact Series episodes are paid for by the party or parties concerned
How would you like a R3-million TV in your living room? Samsung Electronics is happy to oblige – and they’ll even help you install it.
Next year, the Korean consumer electronics giant will launch its new range of ultra-high-premium micro-LED televisions in South Africa – and the top-end model, which measures a staggering 126 inches, will set you back a cool three bar. If that’s too much moolah, a 76-inch model is all yours for “just” R1.5-million.
In this episode of TC|Daily, Samsung vice president for mobile in South Africa Justin Hume and his colleague, Mike van Lier, consumer electronics director, join Duncan McLeod in-studio to chat not only about TVs aimed at wealthiest of the wealthy, but also about the more mass market-friendly products that the Korean electronics giant is bringing to the local market soon.
Hume kicks off the discussion with his views on the local smartphone market, what is driving consumer behaviour, why he thinks upgrade cycles are going to quicken, and why Samsung is all-in on folding phones.
Are foldables really the future of smartphones? Will folding phones ever reach down into the mass market? What are the trends in the middle tier and the low end of the market? And is government right to want to switch off 2G and 3G networks in South Africa? Hume answers all these questions, and more.
Van Lier then takes TC|Daily viewers and listeners through the company’s latest TVs – including those micro-LED monsters – and why he thinks 8K is going to be come the new standard in display technology in the home, displacing 4K by the end of this decade.
Van Lier also talks about the imminent launch of Samsung’s OLED sets in South Africa, and how these differ from its QLED technology. Other topics of discussion include a discussion about the interconnected home and the work Samsung is doing to connect your appliances and your smartphone to create an intelligent ecosystem.
Don’t miss the discussion
Kayamandi, a township next to Stellenbosch, is the subject of two interesting experiments, which, if they succeed, could transform the way South Africans – and the world – connect to the Internet.
The township is the site of two fibre deployments, one being led by Vumatel and the other by Isizwe.
Both companies are experimenting with driving down the price of uncapped high-speed fibre to previously unheard-of levels – as low as R5/day in the case of Isizwe.
In this episode of TC|Daily, Isizwe CEO Steve Briggs – a well-known figure in South Africa’s ICT industry, and most recently a senior executive at Seacom – chats to TechCentral’s Duncan McLeod about the company’s Kayamandi deployment.
Briggs unpacks the lessons Isizwe has learnt so far, what uptake has been like in the township, how the technology works and what the business case is for delivering ultra-cheap uncapped Internet into traditionally underserviced areas.
He also explains the mechanics of the service and how it works, including Isizwe’s relationship with PayGoZo and VulaCoin, as well as what happens next if the Kayamandi project is successful – and early indications are that it will be – and why it could even prove transformative for South Africa and other emerging markets.
Don’t miss the discussion!
EOH Holdings is about to embark on a rights offer, seeking up to R600-million from its long-suffering shareholders as it moves to deal with the unsustainable debt on its balance sheet.
At the same time, the share price – R3.10 at the time of publication – has fallen to levels last seen in early 2020, soon after the start of the Covid-19 hard lockdown sent equity markets crashing.
Is it all bad news at EOH, or is the market overreacting?
Stephen van Coller, EOH’s group CEO, joins TechCentral’s Duncan McLeod in the TC|Daily studio to unpack the debt problem EOH faces: how bad is it, how much is it spending to service this debt, and what happens if the rights issue is not a success?
Van Coller, who joined EOH from MTN Group, says getting the capital structure right will put the IT services group on a sustainable footing for profitable growth. Could that mean a rerating of the share price, too?
In this episode of TC|Daily, Van Coller unpacks:
•The timelines for the rights issue, what shareholders are being asked to do.
•Whether EOH will need to sell more businesses, and investor concern that if it does it’ll be cutting into muscle rather than fat.
•Whether the entire EOH business could be put for sale.
•The profit margins that EOH can reasonably expect in the longer term.
The conversation then turns to the legacy corruption issues at EOH. Here Van Coller tackles several thorny issues, including:
•The civil suits against former directors, including ex-CEO and co-founder Asher Bohbot, how these suits are progressing, and their chances of success.
•Whether we are likely to see criminal prosecutions against former EOH executives anytime soon.
•The recent settlement with the Special Investigating Unit over corrupt dealings at the department of water & sanitation, and whether there are any other legacy issues that could cost EOH money.
•EOH’s relationship (or lack thereof) with Microsoft.
Lastly, Van Coller talks about his time at EOH – and why he would not have taken the job if he’d known he’d be spending his time cleaning up a nest of corruption. He also tells TC|Daily what he may do next when he eventually moves on from the company.
Don’t miss the interview!
Joao Zoio is a man on a mission. As CEO of Acumen Software, he is overseeing the development of My Smart City, a platform that integrates with municipalities to try to resolve service delivery issues quickly and efficiently.
The platform, available on the Web or via smartphone apps, allows residents to log issues that need attention, from potholes to broken streetlights.
It also allows people to connect with a range of on-demand "gig economy" services, including ad hoc home cleaning or gardening services, with more coming. My Smart City recently won the “best enterprise solution” category at the MTN Business App of the Year Awards.
Zoio told TechCentral’s Duncan McLeod in this episode of TC|Daily where the idea for My Smart City came from, how the company is working with municipalities to integrate the platform to help resolve service delivery issues faster, and how it makes money -- municipalities don't pay a cent for access.
Don’t miss the discussion.
The collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX has sent shockwaves through the crypto community worldwide.
In this episode of TC|Daily, Jon Ovadia, CEO of South Africa crypto exchange OVEX, joins TechCentral’s Duncan McLeod from Dubai to talk about FTX’s bankruptcy and what it means for South African crypto players and for the ecosystem more broadly.
FTX, which is a shareholder in OVEX, was forced to file for bankruptcy protection after founder Sam Bankman-Fried was unable to secure emergency funding to keep the business afloat after customers took fright and began withdrawing billions of dollars from the exchange.
John Ray III, an insolvency expert who oversaw Enron’s liquidation, has been appointed to oversee the FTX bankruptcy. He has described its collapse as the worst case of corporate failure in the more than 40 years he’s been in the insolvency business, and has compared it to the failure of Enron, the Financial Times reported.
In this episode of TC|Daily, Ovadia unpacks:
•The impact of the FTX collapse on OVEX clients, if any.
•OVEX’s decision to revoke FTX’s authority to market its offshore crypto derivatives products in South Africa and what that means.
•What went wrong at FTX, why it caught the crypto industry by surprise, and whether fraud or other criminality was likely involved.
•The damage to crypto as an investment class as a result – will this incident scare away investors from the crypto space for good?
•Whether investors should leave their money in crypto exchanges – is it safe?
•Whether better regulation would have prevented the FTX disaster – and are South African regulators doing enough to regulate the crypto space?
Ovadia also provides an update on OVEX and its international expansion plans.
Don’t miss the discussion!
Former Altron Group and MTN South Africa chief executive Mteto Nyati has strong views on South Africa, specifically regarding the country's potential with the right leadership in place.
Nyati joins Duncan McLeod on TechCentral's TC|Daily technology show to chat about the announcement this week that he has acquired a 40% stake in technology and business consultancy BSG (Business Systems Group) and how the deal came about.
Nyati, who will serve as BSG's executive chairman, explains why he felt BSG was a good fit for him, and why he believes it will afford him an opportunity to build on his legacy.
The conversation touches on a wide range of topics, including why Nyati joined the Eskom board -- an unexpected appointment, he says -- and decided to join the Nedbank and Telkom boards, too.
He also provides his views on the outlook for South Africa, and explains why he believes that the country has a bright future -- provided it gets the right leadership in the right places.
Russell Southwood probably knows more about the communications revolution in Africa than anyone. The founder and CEO of Balancing Act Africa, Southwood has covered the industry for decades.
In a new book, he's now shared the story of how Africa went from having fewer telephone lines than Manhattan in 1986 to having telecommunications serve as a platform for sweeping changes in the way Africans communicate, connect, entertain themselves and engage in commerce.
Southwood's "Africa 2.0 - Inside a Continent's Communications Revolution" tells the story of what sparked the telecommunications boom in Africa and the people and companies who led it from the front.
Southwood joins Duncan McLeod in the TechCentral studio to talk to TC|Daily about the book.
In the discussion, he relates some of his most memorable experiences of covering ICT in Africa.
Other topics covered include:
The importance of prepaid in igniting the communications boom in Africa;
The genesis and rise of mobile money;
Why the sector only boomed when governments got out of the way; and
How corruption has impacted - and continues to affect - the sector.
As investments in undersea cables, cloud data centres and fibre networks accelerates, Southwood gives his views what the next chapter might look like for ICT in Africa.
Don't miss this great discussion!
In this episode of TechCentral’s Impact Series, CYBER1 Security president and board member Rob Brown and Palo Alto Networks regional director Trevor Coetzee are in the studio to chat about the latest in the ever-changing world of information security.
In the show, Brown tells TechCentral’s Duncan McLeod about the decision to change the name of Dynamic Recovery Services (DRS), which had been in the market for 25 years, to match parent, Sweden’s CYBER1 – what it means for the company and its clients.
CYBER1 recently attained diamond partner status with Palo Alto Networks, and Coetzee unpacks what Palo Alto does and its market positioning.
The conversation then turns to some of the big trends in the information security market, and some of the incidents that both Palo Alto and CYBER1 are seeing on the ground in South Africa, including the ransomware menace and what can be done about it. Brown and Coetzee also take a look at the next generation of cybersecurity threats and where they’re coming from, including threats to OT (operational technology) systems, and why OT has become a big focus of attackers.
Other areas of discussion include the impact on security from the shift to cloud computing as well as the dire shortage of security skills in the IT industry and why automation might help alleviate this problem to some extent.
If you’re involved in infosec, or are in any way concerned about your organisation’s defences against increasingly sophisticated threats, don’t miss this discussion.
Wetility co-founder and CEO Vincent Maposa is a busy man.
The alternative energy start-up is helping South African homeowners go solar, overcoming (or at least reducing the impact of) load shedding in the process, using financing models that don’t result in prohibitive upfront capital costs.
Wetility – pronounced we-tility – is one of several South African start-ups in this space, including GoSolar and Vivica Group-owned Stage Zero – that help homeowners go partially (or even fully) off-grid while using clever financing models to amortise the cost of the installation over time.
In this episode of TC|Daily, Maposa tells TechCentral’s Duncan McLeod about Wetility’s approach to financing, and why the company offers homeowners a range of options, including the ability to pay in full, or to use a subscription model, where they are charged monthly for the energy they use from the sun.
Maposa tells McLeod why he started the business, his background as a management consultant with Deloitte and with Cummins, and how Wetility came to be backed by pay-television group MultiChoice.
The company, which in the next few weeks is expected to unveil a series-A funding round to help it scale rapidly, talks about why Wetility decided to focus on the residential rather than the business market, how its offerings differ from other players in the market, and what consumers should know about going solar.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone in South Africa as passionate about public broadcasting as Michael Markovitz.
A former journalist whose storied career has included serving as adviser to Mandla Langa, the former chairman of communications regulator Icasa, Markovitz has just completed five eventful years as a member of the SABC board.
He joins Duncan McLeod in the TC|Daily studio to talk about his experiences at the public broadcaster and why, despite its “capture” under former President Jacob Zuma and the abuse it endured under its former chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng, he still believes there is a strong case to be made for public broadcasting in South Africa.
The question, Markovitz says, is who will pay for public broadcasting in an environment where few South Africans are prepared to pay their television licence fees.
What funding models are appropriate, and why? Should a household television levy be applied? Markovitz unpacks this thorny issue in this episode of TC|Daily.
He also chats about:
•His new role as head of the Gordon Institute of Business Science’s new Media Leadership Think-Tank, and what he hopes it will achieve;
•The mess the recently departed board of the SABC inherited from the Motsoeneng era and what it took to clean it up;
•Whether the SABC can avoid a repeat of that disaster, and policy changes might be needed to protect the corporation from abuse by the executive arm of government;
•Why the delay in appointing a new SABC board is highly problematic;
•The case for public broadcasting in South Africa and appropriate funding models;
•Planned changes to broadcasting legislation;
•South Africa’s digital migration disaster and what went wrong; and
•The era of streaming and media fragmentation, and what this means for public broadcasting.
Don’t miss this great discussion!
Television white-spaces (TVWS) spectrum – the gaps in the frequencies used by terrestrial TV broadcasters – has long been seen as a way of bringing affordable Internet to even remote areas.
But what’s happened with the various TVWS initiatives in South Africa?
Keith Pitout, a leading local expert on the subject and chief technology officer of Indigo Broadband, joins TechCentral’s Duncan McLeod in the TC|Daily studio to unpack the latest developments – and to explain why he believes TVWS has a bright future ahead of it, despite some early hiccups.
In this episode of TC|Daily, Pitout covers:
• What TVWS is and how it works;
• Why it’s so affordable to deploy and who will benefit from its roll-out in South Africa;
• The trial TVWS projects that took place in South Africa;
• The CSIR’s involvement, and why it’s been key;
• The regulations developed by communications regulator Icasa;
• The commercial TVWS projects now being rolled out in South Africa; and
• What comes next for TVWS, both from a business and technology perspective.
Don’t miss a great discussion about an important technology for bridging the digital divide in South Africa.
The leadership teams at Vumatel and Vuma parent Maziv don't dream small.
The company, South Africa's largest provider of fibre-to-the-home broadband infrastructure, has an audacious plan to deploy fibre not only to townships - a project that is already well under way - but also to informal settlements.
It doesn't intend doing this via wireless for the "last mile". It wants to deploy a fixed-fibre connection into every house and into every dwelling, even if the household's total income is less than R5 000/month.
It wants to drive down the price of uncapped broadband to less than R100/month, and in so doing make uncapped Internet access available to almost everybody in South Africa who wants it.
Pie in the sky? No, says Dietlof Mare, CEO of Vumatel and Maziv, in this wide-ranging interview with TechCentral's TC|Daily. The team is working hard to perfect the model and is confident it will be able to do it - and profitably, too.
In this episode, Mare talks about the success of the Vuma Reach prepaid fibre roll-out in Mitchells Plain in Cape Town, and how Vuma is replicating that model across the country, including in sprawling townships like Soweto, Vosloorus and Soshanguve in Gauteng.
He also unpacks Vuma Key, Vumatel's plan - now in pilot phase - to bring uncapped fibre Internet to places like Alexandra in Johannesburg and Khayelitsha in Cape Town.
Also in the interview, Mare talks about:
The creation of Maziv, the new holding company of Vumatel and Dark Fibre Africa, and why it was formed;
The latest on the Vodacom acquisition of a significant minority stake in Maziv and what the operator brings to the table;
Consolidation in the fibre network operator market in South Africa, and why the big mobile operators are going to play a leading role in this; and
The importance of open access.
Don't miss this fascinating interview.
What's the coolest PC tech in the world right now, the stuff we just have to have, budget be damned?
In the final episode of season 2 of Everything PC, hosts Duncan McLeod and Gerhard Pretorius try to answer this question by picking 10 of the very best bits of tech available today, from insane monitors, like Samsung's new Odyssey Ark, to AMD's screeching-fast latest desktop processors.
Basically, the tech we are lusting after right now.
Everything PC season 2 is sponsored by HP and Microsoft. Until season 3, thanks for watching/listening, and happy computing!
The context of how businesses engage with customers is vital: it reassures clients that they have been heard.
Clara Wicht, Telviva senior product and marketing manager, and Rob Lith, chief commercial officer, join James Erasmus to discuss current developments in the customer service industry in this Impact Series episode.
Long gone are the days of PBXes and Post-it notes. Customers engagement is becoming more unified, and agents are now more empowered to respond with a single view of the customer’s profile and historical engagements in a meaningful and useful way.
Telviva Engage is a locally developed and scalable platform that integrates into existing CRM and other business systems, on premises or in the cloud (or a combination both).
Wicht explains: “It’s an all-in-one platform that aggregates multiple engagement channels into a single view, all while empowering quicker and more informed responses to customer engagements.”
Lith suggests putting the platform to the test by visiting the Telviva Engage and seeing how the company can synchronise multi-channel engagement, including Web, social media, WhatsApp, and fixed and mobile voice and chat.
“We believe that contact centres, customer service centres and customer-facing teams should be empowered to have a single, user-friendly view of all the channels on a browser that they can access anywhere, on any device, for a more authentic, immediate customer experience,” Lith says.
* Impact Series episodes are paid for by the party concerned
Cliff de Wit, a former Microsoft South Africa director and now chief technology at Altron's Netstar, is passionate about many things: skills development, the internet of things, artificial intelligence ... even astrophotography.
He joins TechCentral's Duncan McLeod in the TC|Daily studio for a wide-ranging -- and fascinating -- discussion on some of the latest technologies Netstar is exploring that take the company's offerings well beyond the traditional tracking and recovery of vehicles it's traditionally known for.
Well known in developer circles -- he maintains a keen interest in software development as well as in education and skills development from his Microsoft days -- De Wit chats about how Netstar is taking the vast amount of information the company collects daily, and refining it into something forward-looking, useful and actionable.
He also takes us into the world of astrophotography, and much more besides.
Don't miss the discussion -- and do subscribe to TC|Daily if you haven't already done so (details below). The full-resolution Milky Way image taken by De Wit that he speaks about in the interview can be found here.
Sascha Sauer, the head of Audi South Africa, believes local electric vehicle sales are poised for take-off, despite challenges such as high importation taxes and customer concerns about load shedding.
In this TechCentral Impact Series interview, Sauer says South Africans have started taking a much keener interest in electric cars, with a wide range of electric vehicles having been introduced into the local market in the recent past – and more to come.
Models already available locally from Audi are the e-tron, e-tron Sportback, e-tron S Sportback, e-tron GT Quattro and the RS e-tron GT.
In this Impact Series episode, Sauer unpacks Audi’s EV strategy for South Africa, chats about the EVs Audi has introduced to local consumers already, and the German marque’s roll-out plans in the years ahead.
He also talks about Audi’s plans to stop manufacturing models with internal combustion engines entirely, and how that will impact Audi buyers in South Africa.
The move to electric is a big deal for car buyers, manufacturers and the dealer networks. Sauer unpacks in detail what to expect and the work that Audi South Africa has already done in anticipation of a sharp uptick in EV sales, including rolling out charging infrastructure and ensuring the service network is retooled and ready for their mass arrival.
Sauer also busts some of the myths around moving to electric – from the obvious one, load shedding, to concerns about vehicle range, battery lifespan and the availability of charging stations.
If you’re interested in the future of motoring in the South African context and are keen to know more about what Audi has in store, don’t miss this fascinating interview.
Meet the man behind Showmax. As chief operating officer of MultiChoice Connected Video, Barry Dubovsky is leading the charge to bring the 2022 Fifa World Cup to Showmax Pro in 4K.
Dubovsky joins Duncan McLeod in the TC|Daily studio to chat about what has been involved in getting Showmax ready for the World Cup, and what the plans are for bringing other content to the platform in 4K once the global football event has concluded.
An Australian national who has previously worked for telecommunications operator Telstra chats about how he ended up working in a senior role for an Africa-focused video entertainment company. He also unpacks what’s involved in running a streaming video service like Showmax.
Also in this episode of TC|Daily, Dubovsky discusses:
•The tighter integration of Showmax into MultiChoice
•What drove the recent price cuts for Showmax Pro
•Fragmentation of the video entertainment industry and what comes next
•The long-term future of streaming vs satellite and cable
Don’t miss the discussion!
In this special episode of Everything PC, HP Southern Africa regional director Yesh Surjoodeen and Microsoft South Africa chief operating officer Colin Erasmus are in the studio.
They join show hosts Duncan McLeod and Gerhard Pretorius for a discussion on what they do best in this show: personal computers, with a focus on Windows 11. HP and Microsoft are sponsors of season 2 of Everything PC.
In the discussion, Erasmus talks about how Windows 11 has been received by the local market. He also unpacks the 22H2 release, and the new features it brings to PC users.
Surjoodeen talks about the demerger of HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and the impact that had on the local operations. He also chats about HP’s PC line-up, especially its laptops.
Erasmus then delves into Microsoft Work Trend Index report, which surveyed companies around the world, including in South Africa, and what it found about workplace trends and the hybrid workforce.
And being Everything PC, there’s plenty of talk about semiconductors, PC peripherals and plenty more besides.
Don’t miss the show – and please subscribe if you haven’t already (details below).
The launch of 4K for the 2022 Fifa World Cup, the development of DStv Glass smart TVs, the launch of uncapped fibre services, and more – it’s been a busy period for South Africa’s incumbent pay-TV operator.
MultiChoice South Africa CEO Nyiko Shiburi joins TechCentral’s Duncan McLeod in the TC|Daily studio to chat about all the announcements the broadcaster made at its recent DStv Showcase event, and what we can expect from the company in the months ahead.
In the discussion, Shiburi talks about:
• His background in MultiChoice Group, and how he worked his way up through technical and engineering roles into management, eventually becoming CEO of the key South African operation.
• What's been involved in getting MultiChoice ready for the World Cup and 4K broadcasts, including studio upgrades. This includes a look at the modern compression technologies used to minimise bandwidth utilisation as much as possible while still ensuring a good-quality image.
• What we can expect next from DStv in terms of 4K content, following the conclusion of the World Cup in December.
• How important it is for MultiChoice to be seen as a technological leader.
• DStv Glass, the relationship between MultiChoice and the UK’s Sky, and what we should expect from the product offering when it is launched next year.
• The strategic thinking behind the “coopetition” with Netflix, Disney and Amazon, which are available as apps on DStv platforms, including the Explora Ultra personal video recorder.
• Streaming vs traditional satellite and what’s involved in managing that transition from a technology and cost perspective.
• Why MultiChoice became an Internet service provider.
Don’t miss the discussion!
The “data-free” messaging app MoyaApp, which already has six million active monthly users in South Africa, is working hard to become as big as WhatsApp in the country.
The app’s founder, Gour Lentell, joins Duncan McLeod on TechCentral's technology show, TC|Daily, to talk about how the development of the app is progressing.
Lentell talks about the history of MoyaApp, how it’s able to offer “data-free” messaging to people who don’t have data or airtime, and why he believes this is a winning proposition in a country where Meta Platforms-owned WhatsApp has become entrenched.
In this episode of TC|Daily, Lentell unpacks:
•MoyaApp’s business model
•Its growth projections
•His background and how he came to create MoyaApp
•Why MoyaApp is succeeding in South Africa when China’s WeChat failed
•The evolution of instant messaging in South Africa, from Mxit to BBM to WhatsApp
•Super apps and their role in the ecosystem – including a discussion on Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter
•MoyaApp’s monetisation model
•MoyaPay, fintech and a cashless economy
Don’t miss this insightful discussion about a homegrown app taking on global giants.
This is the South African technology show all about personal computers. This season of Everything PC is sponsored by HP and Microsoft.
In episode 4 of season 2, hosts Duncan McLeod and Gerhard Pretorius tackle the world of Mac and macOS. They discuss:
What Apple does well and what Apple doesn't do well
The benefits and disadvantages Apple's "walled garden"
Windows vs macOS
Gerhard's view of macOS as a hardcore PC user - spoiler: he's not at all complimentary
The poor repairability of Apple hardware
Apple silicon: is it better than what's available in the Windows PC world?
Even if you don't use a Mac, we're sure you'll love this episode.
And if you do enjoy this content, please subscribe to this show and TechCentral’s other technology shows on YouTube or through your favourite audio platform.
Alviva Holdings’ latest financial results show a group firing on all cylinders – full-year dividend up 90%, revenue up 57% and headline earnings per share up 91%. But can the party last?
Group CEO Pierre Spies and Craig Brusden, CEO of technology distributor Axiz (Alviva’s largest subsidiary), join Duncan McLeod in the TC|Daily studio to unpack just how the group managed to turn in such stellar results amid a weak local economy and a constrained global supply chain.
Spies and Brunsden unpack:
•The impact of Alviva’s acquisition of Tarsus Technology Group.
•How Alviva’s three main distribution businesses, Axiz, Pinnacle and Tarsus, differ from each other – and why they are allowed to compete, within bounds.
•How the distribution business in South Africa is changing and what that means for the business model.
•The impact of the semiconductor supply crisis, which is now easing.
•How Amazon.com’s launch of an online retail marketplace in South Africa next year will change the IT distribution game.
•The talks to buy out Alviva and take it private – and why Spies believes there is no value in being listed.
Don’t miss the discussion.
Unless you have 100% visibility and are continuously scanning your cloud environment, you are vulnerable. According to recent research by Orca Security, 78% of identified attack paths use known vulnerabilities (CVEs) as an initial access attack vector.
This is significant because most entry points that are exploited can relatively easily be prevented since these CVEs are already known and the vast majority already have remediations available.
Praven Pillay, MD of Maxtec and Sagy Kratu, director of enablement and an evangelist at Orca Security, joined James Erasmus for a brief but fascinating conversation about the harsh realities of public cloud security.
Maxtec is the exclusive distributor for Orca Security in Southern Africa and has offered to guide anyone watching or listening to this episode of TechCentral’s Impact Series through a free-risk assessment and a free 30-day trial of the Orca platform.
With local support from Maxtec, the Orca platform connects to your environment in minutes and provides 100% visibility of all your assets. It detects and prioritises cloud risks across every layer of your cloud estate, including vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, lateral movement risk, weak and leaked passwords, and overly permissive identities.
The adoption of public cloud is accelerating. The security postures, which are your responsibility, have been radically innovated, automated and no longer depend on agents. Consider your cloud investment and ask if you are properly protected.
* Impact Series episodes are sponsored by the party or parties concerned
There has never been a more exciting time to be in the satellite communications industry, says Dawie de Wet, CEO of Pretoria-based Q-KON.
In this episode of TC|Daily, De Wet, who is one of South Africa’s leading experts in satellite communications technology, tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the huge changes happening in the satellite space and what they mean for consumers and for industry.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get the latest episodes of TC|Daily
In the interview, De Wet talks about:
The origins of Q-KON;
Why satellite is going through something of a renaissance, despite the proliferation of terrestrial and subsea fibre infrastructure;
GEO (geostationary orbit) vs MEO (medium-earth orbit) vs LEO (low-earth orbit) satellites – what are they, and what are the latest developments in each?;
How satellite technology has advanced in leaps and bounds in recent years;
Why it might not be the mobile operators that drive a consumer revolution in satellite adoption, but why a revolution is coming anyway;
Starlink, OneWeb, Lightspeed, O3b mPower, AST SpaceMobile and other projects – and is there overinvestment taking place?;
How Africa’s needs are different to the rest of the world’s; and
Q-KON’s role in all of this.
This is a fascinating discussion about an often overlooked area of the technology industry – don’t miss it.
This is the South African technology show all about personal computers. This season of Everything PC is sponsored by HP and Microsoft.
In episode 3 of season 2, hosts Duncan McLeod and Gerhard Pretorius have a look at the world of open-source software and Linux.
They discuss:
The latest tech news
Why Linux runs on everything - from toasters to the cloud - except the desktop
OpenOffice and Libre Office
Why Linux mail clients are so poor?
How Microsoft learned to love Linux - or did it?
Why Windows is becoming more like Linux, and could in fact become a hybrid * Windows/Linux over time
Popular Linux distros
Why PC makers don't make their own Linux distros
* Gaming on Linux
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Spare a thought for Douglas Craigie Stevenson. The Cell C CEO is leading one of the most complex and difficult business turnarounds in South African corporate history.
Craigie Stevenson tells TechCentral's Duncan McLeod in this episode of TC|Daily that it's been a stressful few years for the company's management team, but that the long-delayed but recently concluded recapitalisation of the mobile operator's balance sheet has finally put it on a much more sustainable footing.
It could all have gone pear-shaped, but Cell C's stakeholders, including its bondholders and its shareholders, have stuck with the business, believing, he says, that, despite its troubles, there is real underlying value that was worth saving.
Unlike the previous recap, which did little to solve Cell C's balance sheet woes, Craigie Stevenson explains in the interview that a new strategy and operating model - one in which the company doesn't try to compete with bigger rivals MTN and Vodacom in capital spending - means that it isn't going to repeat the mistakes of the past.
That doesn't mean, though, that there isn't still hard work ahead for Craigie Stevenson, his leadership team and Cell C employees, but at least the operator is no longer facing the prospect of going bust.
In this episode of TC|Daily, Craigie Stevenson discusses:
Cell C's balance sheet after the recap and what it will look like three years from now and why.
Why Cell C was worth saving.
How Cell C works with Blue Label, its largest shareholder.
How Cell C's strategy differs from its rivals, and what that means for consumers.
The progress in shutting down the company's radio access network and what's involved in the project.
Who Cell C wants as a customer, and why consumers should choose Cell C over its rivals.
The importance of mobile virtual network operators to its business.
The importance of having the right company culture.
* Whether MTN's proposed acquisition of Telkom should be allowed to proceed.
It's a fascinating discussion - don't miss it!
In many respects, South African IT services firm BCX is at a crossroads. The storied company, which is now owned by Telkom, may soon bring in a strategic equity partner.
The industry is also facing significant changes, with the shift to cloud changing the business propositions of traditional systems integrators - BCX among them.
CEO Jonas Bogoshi joins Duncan McLeod in the TC|Daily studio for a wide-ranging discussion on the changes sweeping the industry. He talks about everything from the state of the South African IT services sector to BCX's recently announced strategic partnership with Alibaba Cloud.
In the interview, Bogoshi unpacks:
His career background, and his love of mathematics;
The state of South Africa’s IT industry;
How is BCX itself doing;
BCX’s cloud strategy;
The relevance of traditional systems integration businesses like BCX in the cloud era;
The Alibaba Cloud partnership and why it's a big deal for BCX;
Corruption in the IT industry - and how to deal with it; and
What government could be doing better, policy wise, to encourage growth in South Africa's technology industry.
Don't miss the interview!
Rob Walker, owner and director of the Sasol Solar Challenge, joins TechCentral’s TC|Daily to chat about the biennial event that sees local and international teams “racing” entirely solar-powered vehicles across the length and breadth of South Africa.
Founded in 2008 by now GridCars CEO Winstone Jordaan (himself a recent guest on TC|Daily), the 2022 edition of the Sasol Solar Challenge has just concluded. In this episode of TC|Daily, Walker, who bought the event from Jordaan in 2019, talks about the origins of the race and the highlights of the 2022 edition.
Walker explains that the “race”, which covers more than 2 000km, is as much about inspiring the youth into the science and engineering fields, with talks at schools along the route, as it is about the teams showing off their design, manufacturing and strategy skills.
The ultimate winner is the team that manages to clock the most kilometres travelled. The cars’ solar panels are at the “cutting edge of energy technology and stretch over the entire surface of the unique, knee-high cars”.
“The driver sits in an aerodynamic cockpit. Every piece of electronics, carbon fibre, aluminium and steel is as customised as the parts on a Formula 1 racer,” the Sasol Solar Challenge website explains.
“The event runs on public roads, sharing space with trucks and regular traffic, and passes through multiple small towns, to the fascination and excitement of local communities who come out in their thousands to witness science and technology in action.”
This is the South African technology show all about personal computers. This season of Everything PC is sponsored by HP and Microsoft.
In episode 2 of season 2, hosts Duncan McLeod and Gerhard Pretorius chat everything Windows and Microsoft. Among other things, they discuss:
Does Microsoft still care about Windows?
Does the operating still matter?
Windows 11 - how is it, and are we getting Windows 12 soon?
Does Microsoft really love open source and Linux?
Windows as a service and Windows in the cloud
Microsoft as a hardware player with the Surface line-up - is it working?
Don't miss the show, and if you don't already subscribe to TechCentral, please do so.
Walmart-owned retail group Massmart has ambitious plans to become one of the most significant players in e-commerce in South Africa.
In this episode of TC|Daily, TechCentral’s new technology show, the retail group’s head of e-commerce, Sylvester John, joins Duncan McLeod in-studio to unpack its plans.
John, who was a key figure behind the development of e-commerce platforms at Walmart, believes the online shopping market in South Africa is poised for lift-off – from less than 4% of total retail sales today, he expects the figure to jump to about 12% by the end of the decade.
In the interview, John talks about:
•How the Covid-19 pandemic changed the e-commerce game globally and in South Africa.
•His predictions for the growth of e-commerce in South Africa.
•How South Africa compares to other markets, including other developing countries, when it comes to e-commerce.
•How Massmart is using its retail brands such as Makro, Builders and Game to go to market while building a supportive backend infrastructure.
•Why the group is firmly focused on developing for mobile first.
•The acquisitions of WumDrop and OneCart and what they bring to Massmart.
•The relevance of Black Friday – and what Massmart has planned for the 2022 event.
•The impending launch of Amazon.com retail operations in South Africa and why Massmart is ready for the competition.
•The importance of B2B in e-commerce in South Africa.
Don’t miss this fascinating discussion with a key player in e-commerce in South Africa.
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Former technology journalist and now author and entrepreneur Simon Dingle is the guest in this episode of TechCentral's TC|Daily.
Dingle, who co-founded the rand-pegged stablecoin ZARP with Kenny Inggs, chats about some of the latest development in the world of cryptocurrencies.
In this episode of TC|Daily, he unpacks:
The thinking behind ZARP
What it takes to run a stablecoin
Stablecoin regulation
Ethereum's big "Merge" - how important was it?
Is crypto bad for the planet?
What to watch for next in crypto
* And more...
Don't miss the discussion.
The South African technology show all about personal computers is back for season 2. This season is sponsored by HP and Microsoft.
In episode 1 of the new season, hosts Duncan McLeod and Gerhard Pretorius chat about developments at the big chip companies covered in season 1, including Intel, AMD and Nvidia.
They then look forward to what's coming in the world of PCs for the rest of the year, including a looming battle over next-generation GPUs between AMD and Nvidia.
A new segment of the show also looks back at technologies from decades ago - and this week Gerhard has brought in an ancient Maxtor hard drive.
Alviva Holdings-owned GridCars has built South Africa’s largest network of charging stations for electric vehicles – more than 300 so far – yet the company is just getting started, says CEO Winstone Jordaan.
Jordaan joined TC|Daily, TechCentral new technology show, for a discussion about the roll-out EV charging infrastructure in South Africa.
In the show, Jordaan talks about the genesis of GridCars and why he thinks the EV revolution is about to get going in South Africa, despite the country’s electricity supply challenges.
If you’re at all interested in EVs, or indeed the future of motoring in South Africa, don’t miss this fascinating interview.
Big changes are coming to the payments industry in South Africa early next year, including cheap and instantaneous payments directly to mobile numbers – no bank account number or branch code required.
BankservAfrica has been working behind the scenes for years on a major system overhaul that, when it goes live, will dramatically shake up the financial services sector in South Africa, ushering in a new era of fintech-led innovation.
Through a project called the Rapid Payments Programme (RPP) – which will be launched commercially under the name PayShap – South Africans will be able to transfer money instantly from their phones, even, once developed, from instant messaging apps like WhatsApp.
The new platform will usher in a dramatic modernisation of the payments system, with cloud services, open application programming interfaces and a flexible microservices architecture forming the foundation for further development by industry players.
Indeed, the launch PayShap early in 2023 promises to herald a new era of rapid digital payments in South Africa that BankservAfrica believes could begin to displace cash from the economy – astonishingly, despite the country’s sophisticated banking sector, almost nine in 10 transactions are still cash based.
In this episode of TC|Daily, BankservAfrica CEO Jan Pilbauer joins TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod in-studio to talk about the RPP, the launch of PayShap, what it means for innovation in banking and fintech in South Africa, and how companies, including fintech start-ups and social media companies, can use it to develop cutting-edge solutions.
BankservAfrica is a non-profit company established 50 years ago that serves as a financial clearing house for the financial sector. It is a vital cog in South Africa’s economy and is owned by the big banks – Absa, Nedbank, Standard Bank and FirstRand each hold about 23.1% of its equity, while the remaining 7.5% is held by an entity called Dandyshelf, whose shareholders include Capitec, Investec, Bidvest and Sasfin.
Andy Higgins is a pioneer in e-commerce in South Africa – just don’t call him a “veteran”, he says, because the industry is still just getting started and he plans to be a part of its development for years to come.
In this interview on TechCentral’s new technology show, TC|Daily, Higgins joins Duncan McLeod in the studio to talk about his latest venture, called Bob Group, which is an amalgamation of two businesses he either founded or c-founded, Bidorbuy and uAfrica.
Higgins, who started Bidorbuy in 1999 at the height of the dot-com bubble, has many interesting stories to tell – about venture capital excesses, global expansion and the inevitable pain that followed the dot-com collapse – and he shares some of these tales in this show.
Now Higgins and his team are launching a new venture, which he hopes will make it easier for small and medium businesses to sell their products online in South Africa. It’s going to put Bob Group on a collision course with well-funded rivals like Takealot – and possibly Amazon from next year – but Higgins says he’s ready for it.
Bob Group will offer a full suite of e-commerce services to South African businesses, including an online marketplace, inventory management, order fulfilment, a shipping tool, online payments and courier software as a service. It “offers everything e-commerce to all South African consumers and companies operating online, whether they are looking to sell, buy – or both”.
“The merger means that merchants will now be offered a complete set of e-commerce services, including payments, logistics and a marketplace,” Higgins said earlier this week about the launch of Bob Group.
In this episode of TC|Daily, he unpacks more details about Bob Group, and gives his views on what the (still not officially confirmed) launch of Amazon in South Africa early next year will mean for the local e-commerce landscape.
Don’t miss this fascinating discussion.
Africa Data Centres’ newly appointed CEO, Tesh Durvasula, says investment in ICT in Africa is creating nearly boundless opportunities for growth.
Investments in new undersea cables, terrestrial fibre networks and data centres – the latter led by companies like ADC – is helping meet fast-expanding demand from a youthful African population that is coming online for the first time.
Speaking on TechCentral’s new Impact Series technology show, Durvasula explains why he thinks population trends are fuelling infrastructure investments in ICT.
He unpacks the investments that Africa Data Centres, fresh with funding from the US International Development Finance Corporation through its parent, Cassava Technologies, is making on the continent – including expansion into Egypt, Morocco, Senegal and Morocco.
In the interview, Durvasula also talks about:
His career background and how he came to Africa Data Centres;
How Cassava Technologies is structured and how Africa Data Centres works with other companies in the group;
The size of Africa Data Centres today and its plans to build new data centres across Africa;
Why new data centre builds are becoming increasingly focused around population centres rather than centres of biggest GDP;
The power-supply challenges associated with building data centres on the continent;
How new submarine cables like Equiano are going to change the ball game; and
* Technology trends driving cloud adoption in Africa.
Don’t miss the discussion.
Despite the challenges in convincing South African drivers to ditch fossil fuel-powered vehicles for electric alternatives, Mercedes-Benz South Africa co-CEO Mark Raine predicts that more than half of the company’s car sales locally by the end of 2026 will be fully electric.
That’s just four years from now (plus a few months), yet Raine believes the South African luxury vehicle-buying market is ready for this massive shift. And he’s betting big on it, with Mercedes announcing four new EVs coming to local showrooms that it hopes will, umm, electrify fans of the badge.
Speaking on TC|Daily, TechCentral’s new technology show, Raine unpacked in an interview with Duncan McLeod what must happen in the coming years for EVs to take off in the same way they are expected to in markets like Europe and North America.
In the show, Raine chats about the state of the industry in South Africa following the Covid pandemic and last year’s riots in KwaZulu-Natal, as well as Mercedes’ investments locally, including in its flagship manufacturing plant in East London, which manufactures C-Class Mercedes-Benz vehicles for markets around the world.
In the show, Raine talks about:
• Why he believes the local market is ready to adopt EVs, despite concerns about load shedding, charging networks and range anxiety;
• Whether government is doing enough to encourage the uptake of EVs (spoiler: it’s not); and
• Whether we can expect Mercedes to build EVs in South Africa anytime soon.
He then takes TC|Daily viewers through the EV models that Mercedes is introducing in South Africa this year: the EQA, the EQB, the EQC and the top-of-the-line EQS.
If you haven't already subscribed to TechCentral's YouTube channel, please do so now. TC|Daily is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Pocket Casts.
The telecommunications landscape is more competitive than ever and is scaling rapidly. In this environment, CipherWave is building a portfolio of service businesses.
In this podcast, TechCentral gets a sneak peek into what CipherWave is building and where the business is headed.
The holding company, led by CEO Wayne D’Sa, has a number of subsidiaries, through which D'Sa and his teams are delivering technology solutions to growing businesses -- with a deliberate focus on value creation.
These subsidiaries are:
Aggregation Networks
Home-Connect
CipherWave Business Solutions
Broadlink
These people-centric entities all complement each other in terms of service offering, says D'Sa in the podcast.
The next phase of growth is in further enhancing user experience through reliable infrastructure and investment in best-in-class technology.
CipherWave is a leading tier-1 Internet service provider. Learn more in this interview with D’Sa, or visit www.cipherwave.co.za.
Retail Capital identified Sage Intacct as a cost-effective solution for its business, which has been experiencing exponential growth.
Chief financial officer Tyler Posthumus studied Retail Capital’s requirements to scale, and quite specifically stipulated the need for a robust ERP solution with API (application programming interface) capabilities for automation. There also needed to be minimal disruption to the business.
Through an existing and well-defined partnership with AWCape, Retail Capital switched from Sage 300cloud to Sage Intacct. The immediate and long-term benefits are discussed in this podcast and so, too, is the importance of trusted human interaction.
Listening to this episode will give you great comfort in planning your own modernisation as well as insight into why systems can create efficiencies that far outweigh any perceived inconvenience associated with change.
For an overview of Retail Capital’s story, and to hear to the company’s experience, watch or listen to this podcast as Posthumus, along with Jeff Ryan, MD for AWCape (the implementation partner), and Gerhard Hartman, vice president: medium business, Sage Africa and Middle East, talk about the project.
Visit www.awcape.co.za for more information.
In the inaugural episode of TechCentral’s new technology show, TC|Daily, Sean Sanders, CEO of Cape Town-based cryptocurrency platform Revix, chats to host Duncan McLeod about the imminent “Merge” affecting the ethereum blockchain and what it means.
Sanders explains what the Merge is, how it will impact the blockchain and what it might mean for investors in the ether token. Could it even lead to the so-called “Flippening”, where ether overtakes bitcoin to become the most valuable crypto token by market cap?
The wide-ranging conversation with Sanders also touches on the recent (current?) crypto winter and the impact this has had on South African investors in crypto (and on Revix specifically). Other topics discussed include:
•Consumer vs institutional investment in crypto in South Africa;
•Crypto’s correlation with US technology stocks – will it last?;
•Could crypto still become a hedge against inflation?;
•The Prudential Authority's recent “practice note” to South African banks regarding cryptocurrency exchanges – how significant is it?;
•What’s happening when it comes to crypto regulation in South Africa?; and
•Taxing crypto investments in South Africa – the current state of play with the South African Revenue Service.
In this podcast, TechCentral speaks to security specialists Qush Security about companies’ data risks and insider threats.
Chris Denbigh-White, Qush’s director for global customer success, contextualises how the company’s Reveal platform creates relevant visibility for companies to make the right decisions at the right time to protect their people, their operations and their reputations.
Fallon Steyn, regional sales manager for Middle East and Africa at Qush, then illustrates how the user is central to the solution. If we are to do data security better, we need to know what data is, she says. Steyn touches on how the hybrid work model is exposing new data risks and why, with cloud services becoming more prevalent, the security of your data is still your responsibility.
The question IT security leaders should be asking themselves is this: “What specific data security issues should I be focusing on and how effective have our teams (read: “I”) been in reducing risk.”
Modern data loss protection solutions need to respond to rapidly changing needs and threats. Rarely are static rules or compliance training enough to fulfil organisational and business requirements.
This is where Qush Security takes a new approach to this legacy problem. Rather than regarding users as potential risks that require robust mitigation, they take an approach of partnering with them to ensure that both the business and security win.
Listen/watch below. Visit www.Qush.com or www.solid8.co.za for more. And connect with Denbigh-White and Steyn on LinkedIn.
According to Statistics South Africa, only 23% of professionals in science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) fields are women. This is clearly an opportunity for diversification and transformation.
Adri Führi is chief financial officer and transformation lead at e4. She is passionate about advocating for more female-led initiatives in the IT sector. TechCentral spoke to Führi about her vision and her practical experiences.
The barriers to entry as a young learner have been lifted: the subject choices are vast and the old assumptions about the IT industry are, well, old. And tech is certainly not just about coding.
Key messages from Führi include a discussion about how companies can go about choosing the right partners as well as making impactful investments into STEM fields.
Don’t miss the discussion!
In an enlightening and quite personal conversation, TechCentral sat down with Anna Collard, senior vice president of content strategy and evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa, to discuss some of the misnomers and truths about gender bias in the IT sector.
While the conversation is very much focused on encouraging young women to consider careers in tech, it also outlines some practical steps we can all take to create opportunities for young women in the sector.
Collard talks about how she used to be introverted and cautious but is now a role model for young women. She shares wisdom and words of encouragement that will resonate with all TechCentral readers.
The 2022 KnowBe4 Women’s Day Survey interviewed more than 200 women from across the technology industry in South Africa to find out more about how they perceive the industry as well as the gender gap and discrimination. The survey focused on some of the key challenges traditionally experienced by women in the IT sector and interviewed women ranging in age from 25 to 54.
While most of the women (53.5%) felt they had experienced little to no discrimination based on their gender when applying for roles or at work, 43.5% said that they were not paid the same as their male colleagues and 38% said that women were not assertive enough compared with their male colleagues.
The survey results are linked here and we encourage all listeners and viewers of this podcast to reflect on the fact that the industry need not be as male dominated as it is, and on why we should be encouraging girls to study subjects such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We can all mentor someone to explore the dynamic world of IT.
https://blog.knowbe4.com/security-and-gender-the-gaps-are-not-where-you-expect
Never mind the convenience of a mobile app for booking and managing your flights: how great would it be to be able to do all that using WhatsApp?
The customer-centric and innovative team at FlySafair are committed to driving digitisation while remaining agile and relevant – all while maintaining their core values and, of course, having some fun at the same time.
The airline industry has had to adapt to challenges more than most in recent years, and has had to invest into an unknown future. Through a partnership with CipherWave, FlySafair has embraced cloud technology to improve a big chunk of its business operations, and its customers are benefiting.
This has not come without a complex set of processes and tools in the background. FlySafair CIO and managing executive Eswee Vorster and CipherWave CEO Wayne D’Sa share their experiences in this podcast on the airline’s journey to the cloud.
Vorster shares practical stories about his team’s resilient and innovative approach to technology and unpacks how the company’s infrastructure needs are constantly being analysed and enhanced.
D’Sa also demystifies some of the “scary” moments companies can face in their cloud journeys and how CipherWave helps mitigate against the risks that many organisations, including FlySafair, can face along the way.
There are big technological changes happening in the sometimes arcane world of server computing, as Pinnacle ICT’s Ricky Pereira and Peter van der Merwe reveal in this episode of the podcast.
Pereira, who is Pinnacle’s Dell Enterprise product manager, and Van der Merwe, a pre-sales engineer, unpack the new range of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and the innovations these workhorses are bringing to a data centre near you.
Pereira unpacks why these 15th-generation PC servers from Dell are game changers, including:
New CPUs from Intel (latest-generation Xeon) and AMD (latest-generation Epyc) and what they can do;
More cores, resulting in better performance, including in virtualisation - and why this is important;
Improvements to memory and storage;
Faster connectivity with new network controllers;
Liquid cooling as an option, and why this traditionally gamer-focused technology is headed into server farms;
Upgraded Raid controllers; and
The automation of configurations for faster deployment and support.
The two also discuss the security enhancements that the PowerEdge servers bring to enterprises, and how support and service offerings to the market have been improved.
This promoted podcast was paid for by the party concerned
There are many preconceived ideas and myths about what AI is and value it can or cannot bring to an organisation.
This interview, with CallMiner vice president of AI Rick Britt, centres on a selection of myths around AI, what it is, and the value drawn from using it.
Many brands see fully automated CX (customer experience) as a quick and easy way to cut costs, increase issue resolution and improve customer satisfaction. Yet the number one reason customers are directed to a live agent after a failed automated or self-service attempt is because their issue was too complicated for the machine to solve.
AI should be used as a tool to better enhance engagement and relationships, as well as a solution to improve CX and employee performance – not replacing the human altogether but instead allowing the human to use the extra time for creatively growing the business.
“AI is boring at its core because it takes away the boring part of being a human,” says Britt in the podcast.
The discussion explores how conversation intelligence can prove valuable to every organisation.
Cybersecurity Solutions for a Riskier World, the largest benchmarking study of C-level cybersecurity decision makers, found that leaders who adopt a risk-based approach experienced considerably less breaches than others. Additionally, their time to respond to and mitigate a breach was significantly faster.
To be considered a risk-based leader, organisations need to score higher in areas such as attack surface visibility, attack simulation, exposure management, risk scoring and vulnerability assessments. Skybox is uniquely positioned to help you mature your cybersecurity programmes in these areas and more. For instance, the Skybox Security Posture Management Platform is the only solution that builds an extensive network model of a customer's unique hybrid environment, including all L3 devices.
Leveraging its proprietary network modelling techniques, Skybox quantifies the business impact of cyber risks into economic impact. To develop an accurate risk calculation, organisations need the network modelling, exposure management and path analysis that only Skybox can deliver. This financial calculation enables customers to identify and prioritise the most critical threats based on the size of financial impact, among other risk analyses. The Skybox automated cyber risk quantification capabilities elevate the role of cybersecurity and enable chief information security officers to:
•Prioritise critical cyber risks based on vulnerabilities that are exposed and exploited in the wild;
•Target risk mitigation on the most significant risks with remediation options that go beyond patching;
•Make data-driven decisions as they navigate the risks and opportunities of digital transformation; and
•Calculate ROI of cybersecurity budgets to validate and report on the financial impact.
Watch this interesting podcast with Skybox vice president for the Europe, Middle East Africa region Bob Vickers and Skybox regional director Simone Santana to learn more.
In order to effectively defend ourselves and our organisations’ critical assets, we need to increase the global cybersecurity workforce.
According to the research compiled by Fortinet, 80% of organisations experienced at least one breach in the last 12 months that they could attribute to a lack of cybersecurity skills or awareness. This is something that cannot be ignored.
In this podcast, TechCentral speaks to Paul Williams, country manager for SADC and the Indian Ocean Islands at Fortinet, about the company’s pledge to address the gap through its Training Advancement Agenda (TAA) and NSE Training Institute programmes.
Fortinet is committed to tackling the challenges revealed in this report, and all other evidence, through various initiatives, including the Academic Partner programme and the Education Outreach programme to drive a skilled, inclusive and diverse cybersecurity workforce.
At a grassroots level, we are all capable of applying the basic principles of avoiding cybersecurity threats – Williams elaborates on several. But the youth coming out of secondary and tertiary education should explore a career opportunity that may really appeal to them. Access to a vast amount of this learning is FREE!
This is an accessible career path – no matter what the individual’s background may be. If it interests them and they become passionate about it, they will become an asset to any organisation.
Fortinet has pledged is to train a million professionals to increase cyber skills and awareness and make a dent in the skills gap by 2026. What’s yours?
In the final episode of season 1 of TechCentral’s Everything PC show, hosts Duncan McLeod and Gerhard Pretorius discuss Apple’s decision to design its own chips for Mac.
There’s no doubt that Apple’s decision to ditch Intel in favour of its own silicon designs – the chips are made by Taiwan’s TSMC – has had a significant impact, not only on the company, but on the broader computer industry.
Apple’s latest computers, based on the M1 chip (and more recently, the M2), are fast and energy efficient. They have also caught the attention of the Windows PC world.
But just how good is Apple Silicon, and what will it take for the PC industry to catch up – as it transpires, AMD is not far behind, but it’s a much more challenging picture for Intel.
But just how innovative is Apple being with its own silicon, and how heavily it leaning on innovation by its partner, TSMC?
Though Apple has made significant advances with its own silicon, there is a side to the story it’s less keen for its users to hear. We unpack what this is in the final episode of season 1.
Nvidia is one of the most interesting – and controversial – companies in the computer industry today.
In episode 5 of TechCentral’s new podcast series, Everything PC, show hosts Gerhard Pretorius and Duncan McLeod tackle the “Green Goblin” – Pretorius’s description for Nvidia – and have a look at why it is simultaneously admired, feared and even loathed in the computer industry.
Founded almost 30 years ago by Taiwanese-American businessman and technologist Jensen Huang — who continues to serves as CEO — Nvidia was (and is) a pioneer in computer graphics. But the company’s rise to the top has been littered with controversies, including aggressive litigation.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
Where the name Nvidia comes from
Why Nvidia is not particularly liked by its industry peers
Why the company tried to buy ARM (and why it failed)
The GPU shortage and why it’s finally easing
Why the data centre is so important for Nvidia – and how did a GPU maker end up as a major player in the data centre?
What can gamers look forward to in the RTX 4000 line being introduced later this year?
Much more besides
Don’t miss the discussion!
While we are all acutely aware of the Protection of Personal Information Act (Popia), are we considering the most appropriate approach to safe guarding our organisations against the risks and inevitable consequences?
TechCentral spoke to Kevin Halkerd, information security officer at e4 Group, for his insights into what the Popia road map looks like for organisations.
The podcast interview touches on collective review, minimum compliance measures, impact assessments and evidence-based audits – not to mention the fact that we cannot abdicate the responsibility of compliance to third parties.
Halkerd’s experiences and insights into the mood of the Information Regulator are a stark reminder that consequences are going to be forthcoming for those who aren’t compliant.
Halkerd is a certified practitioner of information security with an extensive background in offshore privacy regulations, compliance and information security. He is passionate about privacy regulatory affairs and sees the implementation of privacy frameworks as being beneficial to everyone.
Don’t miss this fascinating discussion!
We continue our exploration of the Intel Corporation this week in episode 4 of Everything PC, this time looking at the current challenges facing the chip giant — and what comes next under the leadership of CEO Pat Gelsinger.
In part 1 of this double episode of Everything PC, your hosts Gerhard Pretorius and Duncan McLeod unpacked the history of one of the most storied companies in Silicon Valley — how it built the PC industry and also how it eventually lost its mojo.
Now, in part 2, we unpack how Gelsinger is trying to fix the mess left by his recent predecessors in the Intel CEO role and ask: can he turn the ship around?
Specifically, we look at:
Why Intel is getting into the discrete GPU market;
Intel’s future in server environments and data centres;
The latest — and future — microprocessor designs from Intel. (Is it time to excited yet?);
The threat from ARM, TSMC and Apple; and
* Much more besides.
Don’t miss the discussion!
Zero Trust. You’ve heard the term, but what exactly does it mean, and what are the benefits of adopting it as a security model?
In this podcast, TechCentral’s James Erasmus is joined by CipherWave CEO Wayne D’Sa and chief cloud officer Casper van der Walt who share best practice in implementing Zero Trust.
With new working models, more devices accessing the network, increased cybercrime, and numerous other risks, CipherWave explores the practical implications of not adhering to best practice and not ensuring the correct implementation of policy and frameworks.
Data breaches and ransomware attacks happen across industries, companies and countries. D’Sa and Van der Walt unpack how CipherWave approaches cyber risk, both as an Internet service provider and a cloud specialist.
The threat is real. And the results can be devastating to a company that has not done proper planning for an adequate security backup policy. This conversation provides perspective about why Zero Trust is a critical consideration, or at least should be, for all organisations.
The Wireless Access Providers Association (Wapa) recently called for government to free up vast tracts of radio frequency spectrum in the 6GHz band, claiming that doing so could drive a wave of economic growth.
Wapa executive Paul Colmer joins the TechCentral podcast (listen below) to unpack why the association has made this call, and why it believes opening up the 6GHz band to unlicensed telecommunications providers could generate huge benefits for the country.
Specifically, the spectrum could be used for Wi-Fi 6E, an evolution of Wi-Fi 6 (technically, 802.11ax) that exploits the 6GHz band.
Wapa, which represents many of South Africa’s wireless Internet service providers, said its own calculations suggest that more than R560-billion in increased GDP could be derived from freeing up 1.2GHz of spectrum around 6GHz.
Two parts
The Wi-Fi 6E band is broken up into two main portions: a lower band from 5 925MHz to 6 425MHz and an upper band from 6 425MHz to 7 125MHz. The Dynamic Spectrum Alliance has urged governments to provide unlicensed access to 700MHz of the upper band.
But why should the band be made available on an unlicensed basis for Wi-Fi, rather than being allocated to mobile operators as so-called IMT spectrum for mobile broadband instead? What about existing users in the band? And if the band is made available on an unlicensed basis, how should it be done?
In the podcast, Colmer looks at what other countries are doing with the band, and why he thinks the time is right for communications regulator Icasa to consider how it plans to make the band available for communications services.
Don’t miss the discussion.
Having concluded a successful spectrum auction and collected more than R14.4-billion in proceeds, communications regulator Icasa has opened the pipeline for considerable economic growth in South Africa.
TechCentral jumps straight into what this means with Riaan Graham, director for sub-Saharan Africa at Ruckus Networks, in this podcast interview.
“Put the delays (otherwise known as the 'debacle') behind us, and let's look forward to building an exciting future. The digital economy is poised to take off, and having access to fast, distributed and cheaper data is certainly going to change our economy for the better,” says Graham.
“Everybody is more efficient and more productive when they are connected," he adds. And this will become even more apparent when 5G is unlocked and truly available to both the formal and informal sectors.
“It is now up to us to find ways to use the spectrum effectively and encourage economic growth. Icasa certainly still has its part to play and could learn something from the our neighbours in Kenya, where Konza Technology City, a smart city also known as Silicon Savannah, is going to be fuelled by a ‘can-do’ attitude and abundant spectrum,” Graham adds.
In the third episode of Everything PC, we begin our adventure into the world of Intel, the company that in many respects started it all back in 1968.
In this episode, the first of a two-parter, Everything PC hosts Duncan McLeod and Gerhard Pretorius look at the storied history of Intel, from its founding by chemist Gordon Moore and physicist Robert Noyce, to its chip designs that helped create and their transform the personal computer industry.
In many respects, Intel is the flip side of the AMD story, which we covered in episodes 1 and 2 of Everything PC -- and we do recommend starting with those if you are new to the show (welcome).
In this episode, we unpack Intel’s early history and its phenomenal rise in the 1980s and 1990s, and how it later lost its mojo amid management upheavals and other self-inflicted wounds.
Part 2 of the Intel story, in which we look at the company’s future prospects under the leadership of Pat Gelsinger, will be published next week.
Huge skills gaps in the cybersecurity sector mean that self-starters who upskill themselves now could quickly put themselves on rewarding and lucrative career paths.
TechCentral chatted in this podcast to Anna Collard, senior vice president of content strategy and evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa, about the company’s recent Cyber Security Skills Pipeline survey and what to do about the opportunity.
Collard, a seasoned cybersecurity specialist and advisor, said the responses to the survey revealed some startling challenges across all industries, the greatest being the lack of qualified candidates with the right aptitude and level of experience.
Said Collard: “On the one hand, we have massive youth unemployment; on the other, we see a cybersecurity skills gap. That’s an opportunity!”
Respondents to the survey showed:
•56.7% could not find qualified candidates;
•71.7% could not find candidates with enough practical experience; and
•50% said candidates did not demonstrate the necessary levels of attitude and aptitude.
Roles organisations most need to fill are:
•Cloud security professionals: 58.3%
•SOC analysts and threat hunting teams: 53.3%
•Risk, governance and compliance professionals: 55%
•Red teaming and offensive security professionals: 48.3%
•Network engineering: 36.7%
•Security culture and awareness professionals: 35%
The solution is to:
•Be a role model. Take on interns and offer young people an opportunity to learn and get experience in this field.
•Look for aptitude and attitude; the technical skills will follow.
•Embrace all opportunities to share and to learn through whatever channel, not necessarily the traditional tertiary institutions, but also micro-learning.
We all have a lot to gain from this conversation and KnowBe4 Africa has certainly exposed the gap. Now, to fill it!
Watch or listen to this fascinating podcast now.
Dean Broadley, head of product design at Yoco, an African technology company, talks to TechCentral in this podcast interview about why and how the firm has deliberately not painted all customers with the same brush, but rather built relationships and maintained trust as an open commerce ecosystem for small businesses.
“Our core customers are a diverse and fluid group of people, and to truly serve them we need to think about all the tools and services they might need in their unique circumstances,” says Broadley. “Our vision, therefore, is to be a multi-product business – a complete payments experience – to help our customers not just accept payments, but manage and grow their businesses.”
Broadley has spent his career working hard to connect experiences in the physical, digital and career spaces, and finds great value in leaving things more “human” than he found them. He firmly believes if we build the humans, then the products will follow.
The design thought process requires a curious mindset and a fascination to unpack the problem before looking at creating a solution. It is this empathetic nature that is reflected in the values of Yoco, in its approach to product design, and in its growing team of ambitious and talented people.
Broadley also talks in the podcast about how through “open commerce” and by creating a coherent experience for existing and new users, everyone thrives.
“The past six months at Yoco have been very busy, we’ve grown immensely in lots of ways. We have a remote team that spans across the Middle East and Africa with a strong tech and engineering team, which is helping us towards our vision,” he says.
Welcome back to Everything PC, and to the second episode of this brand new South African podcast that’s aimed at computer enthusiasts and technologists.
In the second part of a two-parter on Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Everything PC hosts Duncan McLeod and Gerhard Pretorius unpack the Silicon Valley company’s bumpy history, its fights with Intel and why it’s emerging, after five decades in the business, as a powerhouse in semiconductors.
The podcast covers the most important milestones in AMD’s history, including its licensing agreement with Intel to start making x86 chips, its deal to buy graphics chip maker ATi and its recently blockbuster, US$50-billion acquisition of Xylinx – and why it could change everything in the chip business!
Welcome to the first-ever episode of Everything PC, a new South African podcast aimed squarely at computer enthusiasts. In this episode, the first of a two-parter, your hosts Duncan McLeod and Gerhard Pretorius unpack why Advanced Micro Devices - the US chip company better known as AMD - is worth watching. In fact, AMD has a fascinating history, which we unpack in some detail in part 1 of this two-parter episode. Having been founded within months of rival Intel, the companies have had a love-hate relationship for decades. But AMD is on the rise, for various reasons, and is set to give Intel a proper run for its money in the next few years. In this podcast, we unpack why: what is AMD doing right, why has its market capitalisation topped Intel's this year (albeit briefly), why is its "fabless" approach to chip making playing to its advantage, why is its alliance with Taiwan's TSMC so important, and what comes next? We hope you enjoy Everything PC as much as we have enjoyed putting it together. We will push out the first few episodes through TechCentral's podcasting and YouTube channels, but we encourage you to subscribe to the podcasts by searching for Everything PC in your favourite podcatcher.
South Africa’s exchange control regulations and intellectual property transfer rules are harming the potential of South Africa’s start-up ecosystem. This is the view of Llew Claasen, co-founder – with Vinny Lingham – of venture capital firm Newtown Partners, who says the regulations make it difficult for venture capital providers to invest in local start-ups. Claasen joins the TechCentral podcast to talk about the changes the South African Reserve Bank should make to address the problem. The regulations, Claasen says in the podcast, make it harder for South African investors and entrepreneurs to be successful on the global stage. And the rules mean South Africa is at risk – and, in fact, very likely already is – missing out on the billions of dollars in global investment money targeting start-ups from the African continent. Is it difficult for government to change the regulations to promote investment in South African start-ups? And why are the rules there in the first place? Claasen unpacks these questions in the discussion. He also talks about Newtown Partners’ history, the investments it’s made, the company’s partnership with Imperial Group and its focus on corporate venture capital. Claasen, who is an enthusiast of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies, also talks about why he’s excited about decentralised finance, or DeFi, as well as social tokens, and where he sees the crypto space going in the coming years. Don’t miss the discussion!
In this podcast, TechCentral talks to OVEX CEO Jonathan Ovadia and marketing lead Nicola Bergonzoli about the crypto company’s ambitious expansion plans in Africa. Ovadia unpacks OVEX’s plans to expand to 20 African markets by the end of the year and how the company intends getting there. With a trading volume of US$600-million/month and a growth rate of 30%, OVEX is on a mission to decentralise finance across the African continent. Ovadia and Bergonzoli’s insights give assurance to institutions and individuals entering the crypto market. Don’t miss the discussion.
Simon Dingle and Steven Sidley believe a revolution is coming to the world of finance, and it could mean the end of banks – at least as we know them. Dingle and Sidley join TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod to discuss their newly published book on “decentralised finance”, or DeFi, and unpack why they think the staid world of banking is poised for a radical overhaul – one that will lead to the death of financial institutions that don’t adapt to a new world underpinned by cryptography and blockchains. In the prologue to the book, called Beyond Bitcoin: Decentralised Finance and the End of Banks, the authors state that “great fortunes will be made and lost” in DeFi’s wake. Banks, they say, will go through a “painful shudder of reinvention”. They also state that the changes brought about by DeFi will make the trillion-dollar rise of bitcoin look "pedestrian". It will disrupt and displace companies, and even entire industries, they say. Dingle and Sidley unpack why they believe DeFi is going to usher in the biggest technology-led disruption in a generation and what it ultimately will means for banks, individuals and even nation states.
Irrespective of measures you have put in place and the regularity of your system diagnostics, cyberattacks are becoming ever more sophisticated. They are praying on all operating systems and the misguided belief that patching software is enough. And distributed workforces have made the cybercrooks’ job all that much easier. Cyberattacks and embedded ransomware will exploit your vulnerabilities without warning and sometimes over an extended period of time. Together, Maxtec and BigFix can help companies significantly improve their security, lower costs and simplify endpoint management, while providing shared visibility and risk control between IT operations and security. TechCentral speaks to Bret Lenmark, product marketing director at BigFix, and Praven Pillay, MD of Maxtec, to unpack this in more details and why Maxtec’s measure of success is directly proportional to a company’s reduced time to remediation. This is an insightful conversation between two experienced executives who can help reduce your enterprise security risks through intelligent automation.
If we are complacent, South Africa – and Africa – could become consumers of the fourth Industrial Revolution and not contributors to it. This is one of the reasons ICT industry veteran Dr Hasmukh Gajjar wants to capitalise on the ubiquity of smartphones and make credible and useful educational material available for all. Gajjar has over 25 years of experience in the technology sector and, while he has served as a strategic advisor and board chair of Vodacom and to other top businesses, his passion is for people and their upliftment. Gajjar's mobiLearn is contributing to the development and upliftment of people in marginalised communities – and to the broader society – through smartphones, with much of what the company offers available free of charge. In this podcast interview, learn more about these initiatives and why Gajjar is so passionate about digital literacy.
Everything starts with a journey, a journey that sometimes results in unexpected learnings. TechCentral is joined in this podcast by Collin Govender, MD of Altron Karabina, to talk about his career journey and some positive learnings he has shared with his teams. It started at something of a low point in 2018, but through a deliberate vision and staying true to that vision, Govender and his team have brought Altron Karabina to a very different place. Under Govender’s context of celebrating failure and embracing change, great successes are being recognised at Altron Karabina and these are reflected in the big growth in the company’s Net Promoter Score, Employee Engagement Index and profitability . Don’t miss the discussion.
An interview with Bradley Pulford, MD of HP South Africa, on the importance of technology to lifelong learning.
Technology has, now more than ever, become a critical component to a learner's journey and ongoing success after school. The chalkboard and textbooks serve a purpose, but having access to an infinite wealth of information, dedicated resources and online learning through a practical 15-inch screen is radically more beneficial. Bradley Pulford, vice president and MD of HP Africa, joins the TechCentral podcast to talk about some of the offerings HP has in the market to empower Africa. While one would assume processing speeds, storage capacities and other important technical specifications would be at the forefront of the conversation, this was not the case. Pulford was very clear that just as important are security tools. He also elaborated on the fact that we all know that having access to a laptop device is a privilege but knowing what to do with it and having access to the materials is life changing. For more insights as a learner, a teacher or, indeed, as a parent, have a quick listen to this frank conversation and be reassured that HP is far more than just a technology hardware provider. Don’t miss the discussion. Learn more about the programmes discussed in this interview: The HP Idea (Innovation and Digital Education Academy) programme offers teachers and educators the opportunity to create digital capabilities based on educational frameworks from leading international universities. HP Life (Learning Initiative for Entrepreneurs) is a free skills-training programme for entrepreneurs, business owners and lifelong learners all over the world. * This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned
Revix CEO Sean Sanders returns to the podcast to offer his predictions for the world of cryptocurrencies in 2022. The podcast unpacks the relative maturity of the crypto space this year, and delves into a serious discussion on crypto as an investment. Sanders talks about the “flexing” of the market and how that impacts investment in this space.
As business transformation services leader at IBM South Africa, Phil Anderson’s portfolio is a tech geek’s dream job. Creating ways for companies to embrace blockchain, transformative business applications, robotics and artificial intelligence is all part of his domain. He joins us in this episode of the TechCentral podcast to unpack AI and the ethical concerns around the use of the technology. Anderson says ethical choices need to drive AI deployments. “If technology uses the past to predict the future, how do we drive transformation without deliberate, ethical rules to support this transformational objective?” he asks. Anderson unpacks the five fundamentals for a successful AI deployment, namely “explainability”, fairness, robustness, trust and privacy. For a starting point, he suggests choosing a small area with a clear business challenge that can deliver value and get it operational – in eight to 12 weeks – to see immediate AI value. Don’t miss the discussion!
This episode dives into the world of digital transformation from the front end with Salesforce.com and IBM Consulting. Shaun Paul de Caires, capability lead for IBM’s Salesforce practice, talks all things customer relationship management in this podcast. De Caires says this is not a new partnership, and that IBM has a strong Salesforce relationship that spans two decades. It now has a fast-growing team in the South African office and there is focus on attracting consultants. De Caires is quick to dispel the myth that IBM is only for large companies and Salesforce only for sales-focused areas. “Our ideal customer is one with a multitude of challenges and ambitions that wants to put its clients at the centre of its business through the effective use of technology,” he says. Transformation of this nature is complicated, with multiple components intersecting, and this requires solid management. De Caires says consideration needs to be given to the following fundamental areas: data, integration, infrastructure, security and the application ecosystem – all areas where IBM is ideally placed to assist customers. Don’t miss the discussion.
We all know that the world of work has been turned on its head. A recent survey found that 58% of employees want to spend the most and least time in the office for the same reason: more focused work. This is a key finding of The Work Trend Index survey conducted by Edelman Data & Intelligence. The sample of more than 31 000 full-time employed or self-employed workers across 31 markets earlier this year has also helped inform Microsoft that an employee’s flexibility to work wherever they happen to be allows for more innovative thinking and a more productive state of “flow”. Colin Erasmus, Modern Workplace and Security Business Group lead at Microsoft South Africa, joins the TechCentral podcast to talk about these findings and what Microsoft is doing to address the complexities of the required new way of working. Think “people, places and process”, says Erasmus. “The model is simple, the employee engagement is fundamental, and the implications are measured through staff retention and business productivity.” Microsoft is very aware of every organisation’s pressure to adapt and will always encourage a “security first” approach while not interrupting business as usual, he says. In the podcast, Erasmus also unpacks some local examples of how Microsoft is solving business transformation requirements and guiding teams to success. Mark Walker, associate vice president for sub-Saharan Africa at International Data Corp, also joins the discussion to expand on the survey results and shares IDC’s predictions on hybrid working. Based on multiple research sources coupled with desk research that focuses on enterprises in the Global 2 000 list, IDC expects that by 2023, for example, digital transformation and business volatility will drive 70% of the world’s largest organisations to deploy remote or hybrid-first work models, redefining work processes and engaging diverse talent pools. Don’t miss the discussion.
The metaverse. NFTs. Decentralised finance. Most of us have heard of these terms, but what do they mean – and how does one profit from them? In this third episode of a series of podcasts with Revix, we delve into these topics in detail. Sean Sanders, CEO and founder of Revix, provides an update on the latest developments in the world of crypto – from why El Salvador has made bitcoin legal tender and why other countries may follow suit. The conversation turns to decentralised finance, or DeFi, and why it’s important – it promises to cut out the intermediaries in the financial industry, meaning big disruption to the banks. Sanders also unpacks why he believes crypto should form a part of every investor’s portfolio. “Once the jargon has become normal conversation, you’ll know it’s mainstream. My advice is to dig in now, educate yourself and get over the fear of the new.” * This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned
The world of work has changed fundamentally, and quite possibly forever. Companies need to adapt, and one area that needs particular focus is how they manage their physical offices. As the Covid-19 pandemic starts to ease into 2022 – fingers firmly crossed – companies need to manage the gradual return to work of their employees. But how do they make their people feel safe in the workplace, and how can they use the latest systems and technologies to made the workplace more efficient? Ricoh, the Japanese multinational, has a solution: Ricoh Spaces. And in this episode of the podcast, Ricoh International CEO Mark Taylor and Ricoh South Africa CEO Jacques van Wyk unpack the big issues. Taylor, who is no stranger to South Africa’s ICT sector – he recently emigrated to his native UK after decades in senior roles in South African banking, telecommunications and IT companies – gets the conversation going with a look at Ricoh and what it does. He then talks about how Ricoh itself has been reconfiguring its offices and the way it manages them in the wake of Covid and the shift to a hybrid working environment. Van Wyk and Taylor unpack the trends Ricoh is seeing in South Africa and what the last 18 months have meant for productivity – and for the mental health of employees – before turning to how Ricoh Spaces has helped Ricoh adapt, and why they believe the solution can be used productively by businesses everywhere. In essence, Ricoh Workspaces allows you to book a desk or a parking bay, for example. You can book lunch or a boardroom, check if visitors have been vaccinated, and manage the flow of both guests and employees throughout the work environment. This allows better utilisation of company assets and allows companies to plan their workspaces better... For more, visit techcentral.co.za.
In the world of business applications, enterprises are spoilt for choice. Sage Intacct, cloud-based financial management software, is highlighted as the financial solution of choice and makes a strong argument in this episode as to why its solution should be yours.
Jeff Ryan, MD of Sage partner AWCape, and Sage Intacct sales director Erika More unpack the key issues around choosing and deploying a business solution.
The episode takes a deep dive into the reasons why new-age applications should be on your wish list. Sage and AWCape answer questions that cover a broad range of topics: Why a new system? How to choose a solution for your specific business requirements? How long will it take to go live?
Don’t miss the discussion.
Euphoria Telecom is a South African company on a mission to change the perceptions of what telephony solutions can do for your business. This episode of the podcast is geared towards answer the question: “What more can I expect from my telephony provider?” Nic Laschinger, chief technology officer at Euphoria Telecom, explains why, in 2021, your choice of telephony solution matters, how cloud-based systems help and the advantages of using modern communications systems. “Customers are under huge pressure to save costs and innovate on ways to unlock new sources of revenue,” says Laschinger. If you have ever wondered what happens when you put a group of voice-over-IP pioneers into one company, look no further than Euphoria Telecom, a South African start-up success story and a firm that’s about to launch its services globally.
In this episode of the podcast, we meet the executive team of South African Internet service provider CipherWave. The podcast explores the company’s solutions and how it works with customers, as well as its plans for 2022, including empowering customers in a self-service environment. Led by CEO Wayne D’Sa, CipherWave has a young executive team who are making waves in the local ICT industry.
Aravind Pai, partner expert in the product development team in Bangalore for Radisys, joins the podcast for a fascinating discussion on connected homes and businesses. Radisys forms part of Jio Platforms, a wholly owned subsidiary of Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries. With the constant rise in price of basic utilities such as electricity and water, an answer the problem lies in effective utility management. Pai discusses potential solutions using the Radisys toolset to simplify and manage multiple automation devices from one console. Service providers interested in offering these solutions to the market shouldn’t miss this discussion.
Revix founder and CEO Sean Sanders returns to the podcast for a multi-faceted information-sharing session on cryptocurrency investment. Sanders, who has just returned from another round of fundraising abroad, touches on a range of subjects, including how to begin investing in crypto and what should be done from a regulatory perspective. A big part of the episode is about debunking the myths surrounding crypto investment and why Sanders believes that it should be part of an investment portfolio. With the recent news that bitcoin topped R1-million for the first time and the overall crypto market reaching a US$3-trillion market capitalization, this is an episode to listen to. Sanders also talks about Revix’s “no-fee November” for investment and hints at the company’s Black Friday plans.
Sage partner AWCape has not been immune to the impact of digital transformation. Selling various “as-a-service” offerings, the company has embraced the change to what’s needed from Sage business partners and what customers want. Newly appointed AWCape MD Jeff Ryan talks in this podcast about the company’s own maturation and explores some of the challenges faced by South African businesses when considering cloud applications. Gerhard Hartman, vice-president for medium business for Sage Africa and the Middle East, joins the discussion to talk about solving business problems and eliminating complexity by using technology to remove the manual work. Some benefits are obvious, but some are unexpected and welcomed in these tough times. Ryan goes into good detail on what a customer should think about when considering a move into cloud applications. This often helps clients modernise their environments and frees up budget to be used in areas of innovation. This deep dive into the world of partners and Sage is an interesting episode with guests who are both knowledgeable about the space. Enjoy the discussion.
In this podcast, Dylan Horsten, CEO of MySky Networks, examines the role of a managed service provider (MSP) in today’s volatile business environment. IT networking, security, support and guidance all form part of the MySky offering, and Horsten talks through the options. With the MSP market becoming more competitive, customers are now have more choice – and MySky is there to welcome them. Horsten talks about the team, the importance of culture and how a skilled, focused and agile partner can help customers achieve their goals. “The shift to a services-based model continues to grow in the IT field and that’s what we offer.” Horsten also touches on the fact that events are returning and that MySky provides temporary event Wi-Fi solutions for the events industry. “Companies want to be nomadic and avoid lock-in for hardware, IT systems and service. Choice is expected, and that’s what we offer,” said Horsten. As one of only two Aruba Platinum partners in South Africa and an Aruba managed services partner, MySky has the skills and experience to provide world-class managed services to customers, which Horsten sets out clearly in this podcast.
What does it take to build a cloud-ready infrastructure, and how can Dimension Data and Dell Technologies help you do it? We answer those questions in this podcast interview with executives from both companies. TechCentral is joined by Mark Louw, alliances manager at Dimension Data, Frans Taueatsoala, cloud product manager (private cloud) at Dimension Data, and Steve Clewlow, alliance director at Dell Technologies, to unpack this important topic. Louw kicks off the discussion with his views on how Dimension Data differs in this area from other systems integrators, while Taueatsoala talks about his experiences in terms of customers’ cloud transformation journeys. Clewlew, who is based in London, talks about how Dell works with Dimension Data – and its parent NTT – and unpacks some of the global trends around cloud adoption that Dell is seeing right now and how the company is positioning itself to take advantage of those trends. Whether your company has already begun its cloud journey or is still only considering its options, this podcast will provide interesting insights into market trends – including in security – and the current best-practice thinking around implementation and working with systems integrators like Dimension Data. For more information, visit https://www.dimensiondata.com/en-gb/solutions/intelligent-infrastructure/cloud/.
Nik Steffny, chief commercial officer at e4, joins the podcast for a wide-ranging discussion on developments at the company – and in South Africa’s IT sector more broadly. Steffny, who has been with e4 for almost 20 years – he joined soon after its founding – looks back at how the company and the industry have changed in that time, and particularly in the last 18 months as Covid-19 forced a radical shift in the way people work and the impact its had on digital transformation. Steffny also takes a look at how the fintech ecosystem is changing in South Africa and whether the start-ups that are emerging today will become the financial sector giants of tomorrow. The podcast is the continuation of a series of interviews TechCentral has conducted with e4 executives. You can listen to the other interviews in the series here. Don’t miss the discussion!
In this podcast interview, Rudi Potgieter, executive head of Guardian Eye at Vox, talks about the immense opportunity for enhancing video surveillance footage to add real value. With over 2 500 petabytes (1PB = 1 000TB) of video being created every day, the time for automation is here. Potgieter examines the maturing of security monitoring technologies, from screen review to tripwire alarms and into the realm of deep-learning automation. With the cloud services that are built into Vox’s Guardian Eye solutions, security is taken to the next level. Intelligent analytics, proactive alerts and elimination of false alarms are all now the norm. Potgieter also talks about everyday applications such as smart home monitoring, office automation and retail business reviews. If you are using video surveillance – and, frankly, even if you aren’t – you should listen to this episode.
Kris Budnik oversees cybersecurity across all channels at First National Bank. He joins this third episode in an Ava Security series of podcasts to talk about compliance versus data protection.
The conversation, however, covers a wide range of topics, including what’s involved in running a security team for a large bank.
Budnik also provides tips on responding to security incidents and who should be involved and touches on the role of users and security engineers – both of whom need to work in tandem.
As he says in the podcast, security does not happen in isolation.
Don’t miss the discussion!
Sage Africa and Middle East vice president for small business Viresh Harduth returns to the podcast for a discussion on how, despite everything that has happened over the past 18 months, the small business sector in South Africa remains resilient and vibrant. That’s according to new Sage research that shows that, despite the recent turbulence in South Africa, including the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, smaller enterprises remain optimistic about the future. Of the small businesses surveyed, 18% anticipate they will be more profitable post-pandemic, 36% expect to return to trading as before, and 42% expect to be less profitable. That’s despite the serious toll that Covid-19 lockdowns have taken on the economy. In the podcast, Harduth examines the relationship between embracing technology -- together with understanding financials -- and business resilience. He discusses how business owners can enhance this resilience through effective expense management, proactive collection and pricing to succeed. The podcast focuses on profitability in the small business sector and delves into the details, small shifts and techniques to employ to ensure pricing architecture will build a robust and sustainable business, while avoiding typical small business pricing missteps. Harduth also talks to the relationship between brand resonance and pricing structure, positioning products and services in bundles, and where technology fits into the mix. While often daunting to the small business owner, business intelligence tools are the small business’s greatest ally, Harduth explains in the podcast. Don’t miss the discussion!
Aashika Bava, head of security awareness training at Investec, believes cyber-awareness programmes are crucial in the fight against cybercrime. In this episode of the podcast, brought to you by Ava Security, Bava unpacks what’s involved and why Investec appointed a senior manager to drive this area of its business. “Compliance is not the aim; rather it’s about changing behaviour and impacting the culture,” says Bava. Bava explains that her team’s aim is to impact users in a positive way to change their behaviour – to be more aware of threats and to clear out the noise through deliberate, relevant training. The goal is to move from a paranoid state of panic to one of calm preparedness. This episode of the podcast is an interesting deep-dive into how Investec has taken the security message to each employee and why this is important. Bava provides good tips on humanising the challenge, exploring ideas about how to educate and maintain user buy-in effectively. She reminds us that in a “work from anywhere” world, we should not forget security best practices.
Ran Pugach, chief product and development officer at Ava Security, joins the podcast to unpack the role of users in the world of cybersecurity. The first episode in this three-part series focuses on the very real insider threat posed to organisations by insiders. Users, Pugach says, are not cyber experts -- this is a domain for specialists. But users can have a big impact on an organisational security profile. In the podcast, he shares the three-step prevention process employed by Ava – inform, offer alternatives and block – as well as other practical tips to ensure that your users are better informed and aware of security issues as well as how software security scales to suit a dispersed workforce. Making progress in cybersecurity is actually fairly simple, he says: “Identify and measure security issues, interfere and identify troubled users, and then train them.” Don’t this valuable discussion!
If you think Chromebooks are not for you, then it’s important you listen to this podcast with Acer Africa GM Glenn Du Toit. With the baked-in security of Google, a clean interface, and supported by a company that is geared to service, Du Toit explains why companies shouldn’t be ignoring Chromebooks. Du Toit talks about how the cultural shift within his organisation - from chasing numbers to constructing meaningful solutions - has had a big impact and why investing for the future has been worth it. “As a business leader, if you are told that you are buying one device for the entire team, you should look closer. There are devices geared to each user requirement and therefore a blend will always be there,” says Du Toit. “Technology can no longer remain linear if the user experience is at the centre of our ambitions.” Says Acer GM, Glenn Du Toit. Don't miss the discussion!
Banks are facing more competition today than ever, and much of that competition is coming from left field – from non-traditional competitors such as mobile operators and technology giants. The implications, says Standard Bank Group, are dire for financial services institutions that are unwilling to adapt their strategies to compete effectively in what it calls “the platform economy”. The banking group recently published a new research paper, called “The Power of the Platform Economy for Financial Services”, which unpacks the risks and opportunities in detail. One of the authors at the research paper, Standard Bank executive: platform business lead for wholesale clients (digital) Jonathan Lamb, joined the TechCentral podcast to unpack what all this means for “legacy” banks in both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets across Africa. Where is the threat to banks coming from? Will mobile operators, with mobile money services, or social media companies like Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, prove to be the bigger competitive threat down the line? And how can banks respond? Lamb believes banks are in a strong position to counter the competitive threats, but they cannot rest on their laurels. How do they deal with their legacy IT infrastructure (many are still running mainframes at their core), and is the fact that they are heavily regulated an advantage or a disadvantage in the fight to come? Don’t miss this fascinating discussion on the future of an industry in flux.
PJ Bishop, vice president for services at Sage Africa and Middle East, is well positioned to discuss the tools that make a tangible difference to the life of a business owner, and the impact they have on profitability and the bottom line. In addition to his role at Sage, PJ speaks about the technology he uses in his side-hustle – a practice encouraged by Sage, so its employees deeply understand the needs of its customers. If you have any doubt about introducing cloud applications to your core business, this podcast will answer your most pressing questions. Bishop touches on the practical concerns and how businesses can move forward with the adoption of cloud apps. We discuss invisible accounting, invisible banking and artificial intelligence – all baked into Sage’s core suite. The benefits of being plugged into this global engine are clear. Enjoy the discussion! * This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned
After a successful period in the UK, Nicholas Durrant returned to Cape Town to cement and grow Bluegrass Digital, offering insight-driven user experiences, innovation and technology to drive business growth for a global market. In this podcast, Durrant offers a view into the modern services business, often referencing the production line, which is geared towards consistent, high-standard delivery. Founded in the 1990s and built on a foundation of software engineering, Bluegrass Digital has evolved rapidly, servicing clients across Europe, the SA and South Africa, with a focus on digital experience platforms. Durrant expands on the rise of concepts like S-commerce and T-commerce, and the shift in power between buyers and sellers in the market – and how companies like Bluegrass Digital help businesses to deliver on their objectives through outsourced partnerships with specialist software development companies.
Wayne D’Sa is CEO of connectivity provider CipherWave. In this episode of the podcast, he unpacks his plans for the business, including its strong play into the voice space. The company has strong offerings as an Internet service provider, cloud provider and voice partner. In the podcast, D’Sa explores how CipherWave develops and retains talent, with an emphasis on promoting from within, thereby creating a culture of excellence in the organisation. D’Sa goes into detail regarding CipherWave’s strategy, structure and service and why he believes the company is different. As a CEO, D’SA shares his philosophy and how he leads from the front. His technical experience has impacted on his executive leadership style, he says. Enjoy the discussion!
The technology landscape in South Africa has changed enormously in the past decade, helping make the country a hotbed for innovation in contact centre analytics.
That’s the view of Frank Sherlock, vice president of international operations at CallMiner, and Peter Flanagan, MD of Genii Analytics, who joined the TechCentral podcast to talk about why they’re excited about the opportunities in the local market.
Sherlock kicks off the discussion with a view on the shifting dynamics in the South African technology space, how companies are taking advantage of the latest innovation, and why he believes the country is well positioned to tap into the global business processing outsourcing opportunity.
Flanagan shares his views on the South African opportunity before he and Sherlock expand on their partnership in the local market – how it came about and how CallMiner and Genii Analytics work together to serve clients.
They also cast an eye to the future, looking at where the next battleground will be in competitive differentiation, including the impact of technologies such as real-time analytics and agent guidance as well as advancements in artificial intelligence and predictive analytics.
Don’t miss this fascinating conversation!
The Brics formation of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (Brics) offers South African companies – from small businesses to large enterprises – with unprecedented access to markets that make up more than 40% of the world’s population. That’s the view of newly appointed EOH Holdings chief commercial officer Ziaad Suleman, who was speaking to TechCentral in a podcast interview. Suleman is chairman of the Brics Business Council 4IR and Digital Economy Working Group and shared his insights the recent Brics Trade Fair virtual event that took place recently. In the podcast, Suleman unpacks why Brics is important to South Africa, why businesses should be paying more attention to the opportunities it offers them, and what transpired at the trade fair, which took place from 16 to 18 August 2021. He also talks about EOH’s involvement in the Brics formation and why he believes it is of great value to the JSE-listed IT services group. Suleman then talks about the specific value that South Africa can derive from Brics as well as the priority focus areas for the country, specifically around skills development, connectivity, e-commerce and other digital platforms, and small and medium enterprises. He says South Africa has a lot of gain from participating meaningfully in Brics. But is the country using the platform optimally, and is the country getting the focus right from a digital economy perspective? Suleman answers these questions and more in the podcast – don’t miss the discussion!
Africa Data Centres announced a plan earlier this week to ramp up investment in data centre infrastructure across Africa, with plans to build 10 new facilities in the coming years? In this episode of the podcast, ADC CEO Stephane Duproz speaks to Duncan McLeod from London about the announcement, where it plans to build these new data centres and where the US$500-million (R7.2-billion) in planned investment is coming from. In the podcast, Duproz expands on: * The size of ADC's existing footprint; * How much data centre space it plans to build in the coming years; * Whether he thinks the market is getting overtraded, especially in South Africa, where rivals such as Teraco Data Environments continue to invest billions of rand on expanding their facilities; * How ADC plans to interconnect all of its new data centres; * The impact of new, high-capacity submarine cables around Africa on ADC's business and data centre growth in Africa; and * The need to - and challenges of - building green data centres on the continent.
Ever wondered what Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE’s) GreenLake solution can do for your business? In this episode of the podcast, HPE country channel and sales lead Sandile Dube and Dimension Data regional head of solutions Quintus Moolman unpack what HPE GreenLake is exactly – HPE describes it as “the cloud that comes to you” – and what application it has in the South African business context. Dube explains what South African companies need to know about GreenLake, how they can use it to good effect and why it’s particularly relevant in the current environment. He also talks about the top priorities right now for enterprise clients and how GreenLake can help them in their IT strategies. HPE is positioning itself as “the as-a-service company”. Dube explains what this means for the market. Moolman then provides a view on the public vs private vs on-premises cloud debate and the current best-practice thinking around this. He also discusses what HPE GreenLake brings to the party, including the ability to offer cloud-like agility to on-prem IT. Don’t miss the discussion about some of the most pressing issues facing companies today!
Comair CIO Avsharn Bachoo has a quiet determination about him and a leadership style that drives change and provides a clear path for his team to follow. The focus of this episode is digital transformation. Where others seem only to be talking about it, Bachoo has enabled transformation at Comair, collapsing on-premises data centers, building a common cloud platform to dynamically spin up or down workloads to cater for customer requirements, and keeping the team invested in the change process. Bachoo touches on making mistakes as a first mover and how that is managed in his context of risk management in a cloud architecture. “Get the applicable workloads into the cloud, then you can start optimising for performance; soon your cloud will outperform on-premises legacy.” But there are lessons to learn… The transformation strategy was adopted to provide agility and enable responsiveness to customer needs, and Bachoo is quick to point out that unless the customer is central to the change there will be no benefit to them. “Customers are digital and mobile friendly, so our channels need to enable that,” he says. Bachoo is clearly passionate about his team and company, giving great insight into the world of a CIO in the airline industry. He also reminds us that, when allowed, it’s safe to fly! Enjoy the discussion!
As surprising as it sounds, there are still businesses that operate without an integrated accounting, payroll or payment software to help them. That’s one of the concerns aired by Viresh Harduth, vice president of small business, Sage Africa and Middle East, in a podcast interview with TechCentral. Harduth unpacks some of his essential tips for small businesses, explaining why this is the most exciting sector to work in and how Sage is diving in to help customers affected by the market turbulence experienced in South Africa of late. He also shares how Sage evolved almost overnight to a remote working environment and believes that “everyone has earned the right to a healthy and flexible work-life balance”. “Over the past seven years, technology has evolved so much that the products and solutions previously only accessible to enterprise businesses are now affordable to small businesses. Barriers to entry are the lowest they have ever been for digital adoption, and small businesses should take advantage now,” says Harduth. He also discusses Sage’s new Sage technical releases – which point to a robust road map. His passion for small business is reflected in his commitment to the Sage team.
Fikile Sibiya is chief information officer of e4. She knows just how much pressure CIOs and IT leadership teams have been under over the past 18 months, with Covid-19 impacting them hard. In this podcast interview with TechCentral, Sibiya talks about how CIOs have helped steer their organisations through a time of great stress and uncertainty and how they are beginning to emerge on the other side wiser but with the battle scars to show for it. Can IT leaders ever really prepare for an event like Covid and the sudden need for their companies’ employees to work from home en masse? And what lessons have been learnt through it all? Certainly, many people may underestimate the strain that people in positions of IT leadership have been through in the last year and a half, Sibiya explains in the podcast. And South Africa’s unique problems – not least of them load shedding – has added to this. Is a remote workforce, or even a hybrid workforce, sustainable in the longer term? How do companies manage productivity when their employees are working remotely? And equally, how do they ensure people don’t burn themselves out? Sibiya tackles all of these important questions – and more – in the podcast. The conversation also touches on the security aspects of working from home as well as the impact of the Protection of Personal Information Act. Lastly, Sibiya talks about a passion of hers: fintech. She explains why fintech start-ups have seen enormous growth through the Covid lockdown and how the technology holds huge promise for the unbanked and the so-called “township economy”. If you’re in IT leadership, or even just interested in it, make sure you don’t miss the conversation.
This episode of the podcast brings a fitting end to Women’s Month as we get to know Nyeleti Shikwambane, a mother of four who is also the Huawei Enterprise product manager, IP, at Pinnacle. Speaking from home – Nyeleti has welcomed a new baby into her life a week ago – she shares her ups and downs being a female leader in the still male-dominated world of IT. Her insight into life and management, and her advice for young entrants into the working world, make for an interesting interview. Shikwambane has an open, candid outlook, which is laced with optimism; she is a great example of hard work. From humble beginnings to a high performing leader, she shares it all. “Leadership in IT has a place for us all. I don’t want to manage like a man; I bring a motherly side, which is part of me. It makes me special and my team responds to that,” she says. Enjoy the discussion! * This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned
By 2025, global data creation is projected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes, according to Statista. This growth does not always happen within neat boundaries, nor within systems of record – rather, unstructured formats make up much of the critical business data driving the economy. This poses massive risks to businesses from both malicious sources and innocent employees. Praven Pillay, MD of Maxtec, and Kfir Kimhi, co-founder and CEO of ITsMine, join the TechCentral podcast to discuss challenges being faced by business and the associated risks, and the solutions to them. ITsMine is an Israeli company offering is a multidimensional data loss prevention (DLP) tool that is easy to install, simple to manage and powerful in its operational focus. Kimhi explains that the DLP focus is now everyone’s challenge, and can have significant impact on any organisation, but the solutions do not have to be overly complicated nor expensive to deploy. “Within one day, we can have a working solution in a customer’s environment,” says Kimhi. Join us to learn how this can be achieved, as well as hear about an exciting offer from Maxtec to coincide with its ITsMine South Africa launch. * This promoted podcast was paid for by the party or parties concerned
Kim Reid has spent the past 10 years building Takealot Group – today controlled by Naspers – into South Africa’s largest e-commerce company. He sat down with TechCentral to reflect on his time at the helm. Reid, who will step down at the end of September to take on the role of board chairman – he will be replaced in the hot seat by outgoing Illovo Sugar MD Mamongae Mahlare on 1 October – reflects in the interview on some of the pivotal decisions that contributed to Takealot’s success. He also talks about what his new role will entail: It’ll be much less operational and much more strategic in nature. He explains why he’s decided to step down as CEO now – even though Takealot is still very much a growth business – and why he believes a changing of the guard is important in the South African context. He also talks about how big the e-commerce opportunity is in South Africa, even after 10 years of solid growth. He also talks about the Competition Commission’s probe into the sector – he believes the regulator should leave the industry alone instead of interfering where it’s not warranted – and why the Post Office’s attempts to gain a monopoly over the delivery of packages weighing less than 1kg makes no sense. Lastly, Reid touches on what the future holds for Takealot, including expansion elsewhere in Africa and why that’s not in the company’s immediate plans. Don’t miss the discussion!
Sage has made a significant impact in the applications market and today, Gerhard Hartman, vice president: medium business at Sage Africa and Middle East, joins the TechCentral team to chat about creating efficiencies in business and driving key performance indicators. He talks about providing business software to drive success. In his opinion, South Africa is a maturing applications market that adopts technology to enhance business while saving time. Sage helps achieve this through constant enhancement and innovation such as VAT automation, which Sage recently announced. “If we save our customers minutes, the cumulative savings help them achieve their business goals,” says Hartman. Further, he talks about Sage’s Business Cloud Marketplace – a curated selection of cloud-native, and cloud-connected apps to help businesses perform at their best – all of which integrate with Sage and enhance the solutions for specific industries. This marketplace supports the evolution of Sage partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) and establishes a path to the cloud for ISVs and partners that are not yet deep in the cloud. It features a dramatically enhanced customer experience, along with better process automation and self-service capabilities for ISVs. Hartman is open in his ambitions of “customers for life” and explains how Sage focuses on the customer experience for large, medium and small customers. After spending time in the podcast focusing on Sage customers, Hartman finishes the episode with advice for all customers on the digitisation journey.
Shoprite Group on Wednesday announced it has launched a pilot store in Cape Town that has no cashiers and no checkout counters. The store is entirely powered by cameras and artificial intelligence software. There isn't even a point of sale -- consumers' bank cards are billed automatically as they leave the store with the goods they have selected. TechCentral spoke to Shoprite Group chief of strategy and innovation Neil Schreuder about the store -- called Checkers Rush -- and why the JSE-listed retail giant is testing the concept in South Africa. Similar to Amazon Go -- Amazon.com's cashierless stores in the US and the UK -- Checkers Rush promises an "automated, cashless 'no queues, no checkout, no waiting'" experience. It's in internal testing with employees for now but may be rolled out wider if it proves successful in the pilot. The concept store is the brainchild of Shoprite Group's new division, ShopriteX, which use data science to “enhance customer experiences”. The division was also responsible for the popular Sixty60 online shopping app. Don't miss the discussion about innovation in South Africa's retail sector.
Axiz is well known for its distribution network, but its cloud services business is growing rapidly, too. With the aid of Morpheous, a multi-cloud management platform, Axiz may have found the secret ingredient to minimising cloud-sprawl risk for both large and small companies in South Africa. In this promoted podcast, Willie Jansen van Rensburg, executive at Axiz Cloud Technologies, and Andrew Green, “chief nerd herder” at Software Evolution Africa Limited (SEAL), join host Daniel Robus to discuss start-ups, market positioning, common mistakes and technology solutions. SEAL has secured the exclusive Africa distribution rights for the Morpheus platform, a multi-cloud management system and application modernisation platform. The partnership with Axiz Cloud Technologies boosts the product’s reach – allowing it to meet the growing demand for this all-in-one solution that manage hybrid, multi-cloud environments. Morpheus is a management platform that integrates with most brands and applies from bare metal to DevOps, FinOps, CloudOps and SecOps across practically any cloud platform, whether on-premises, hosted or public. Jansen van Rensburg points out the advantage of using the toolset to help both large corporations and smaller clients unclutter the job of managing an ever-growing sprawl of applications and cloud environments. Jansen van Rensburg has used Morpheus to successfully augment his growing cloud services team at Axiz. They are geared to support and manage customers in all stages of digital transformation. “The rush to cloud by some early adopters,” says Green, “has led to a few unexpected bills -- of biblical proportions.” Green explains how Morpheus prevents this from happening. Any teams struggling to get to grips with their application landscape on an enterprise level should listen to the discussion. For more, e-mail Sanet.Engelbrecht@axiz.com.
First Distribution supports multiple partners, but one of the fastest growing is Trend Micro, which has been offering world-class security solutions for more than 30 years now. In this episode of the podcast, host Daniel Robus chats to Trend Micro’s technical lead for sub-Saharan Africa, Emmanuel Tzingakis, and First Distribution GM for cybersecurity Brad Stein. Security is a hot topic in the IT sector, and for good reason. An impatient workforce, the need to work from just about anywhere, legacy applications and rapid digital transformation are all contributing to a whirlpool of potential security issues. This podcast discussion unpacks some of the challenges faced by clients and breaks down how to get the most impact for customers. Security should form part of an integrated business strategy and cannot be seen as a “silver bullet”. With threat actors becoming even more agile than businesses, security teams are more hard-pressed than ever to counter the threat. Zero Trust is the objective, and this requires constant review to ensure the business stays ahead of the threat curve. This calls for a means to get insights to drive action. Tzingakis unpacks the Trend Micro solution to achieving this. The solution is not a rip and replace, but rather an augmentation strategy designed to leave no holes. Both Stein and Tzingakis have great insights to share on the subject – don’t miss the discussion! * This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned
Sean Sanders, founder and CEO of Revix, joins Daniel Robus in this episode of the podcast to talk about why he started the cryptocurrency investment company and his plans for the future. It’s an interview with a difference, though, with a strong focus on building a fintech business in South Africa, why he moved back to his hometown of Cape Town after a stint in the UK, and his thoughts on leadership, team development and learning – and making mistakes along the way. As a self-confessed “control freak”, Sanders is dealing with his own insecurities of empowering team members and allowing for failure. It’s a journey of self-discovery, he explains in the podcast, all while making a big impact in the South African investment market. Don't miss the discussion!
Stellenbosch-based start-up 6DOT50 is hoping to help consumers spend bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in retail stores and online in South Africa, making it easier to use crypto money for purchases. In this episode of the podcast, 6DOT50 founder Warren Venter talks to TechCentral's Duncan McLeod about why it’s enabling support for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether in its payment platform and why it believes there’s demand for such as service in South Africa. “Until now, cryptocurrencies have failed to fulfil the primary purpose of money, being its ability to be exchanged for goods and services,” said Venter. “6DOT50 has solved this problem by positioning its Digital Rands money vouchers as the bridge between the crypto world and fiat world, and providing an offramp for crypto value that offers merchants a common, stable and reliable measure of value to accept as payment.” Venter explains in the podcast that 6DOT50 offers a free transactional account to all users and is now accepting bitcoin, litecoin, ether, bitcoin cash and dash as payment for its Digital Rands e-vouchers. The Digital Rands can be spent at 40 000 retail points of sale in South Africa. “Our primary objective was to solve the general acceptability problems associated with crypto and to make it as acceptable as cash and bank card payments. By providing an instant conversion of crypto from the consumer into Digital Rands, merchants can accept payments from crypto enthusiasts without any of the risks that have prevented merchants from adopting crypto as payment before.” Merchants that accept Digital Rands as payment include all Zapper QR code-enabled stores and online retailers as well as all Shoprite Group and Cape Union Mart Group stores and selected Famous Brands outlets. In the podcast, Venter explains why 6DOT50 is investing in supporting cryptocurrencies and talks about how the process of converting cryptocurrencies into electronic vouchers works in practice. Don't miss the discussion!
In the second of a series of interviews with e4, TechCentral is joined by the company's business development manager, Carla de Abreu, for a discussion on modern document management. Document management software is an increasingly critical part of any business in the digital era. Instead of rows of filing cabinets, document management systems create an electronic archive that any permissioned user can access and edit. In an era of digital transformation, document management software helps organise companies' digital documents and digitise existing paper records with ease. In the podcast, De Abreu unpacks, among other things, what South African legislation says about electronic documents and document signing; the process and capabilities around authentication of documents; and the verification of documents and what is involved. She also takes listeners through the various products that e4 offers in the document management space: Docfusion, Prosign, Autoverifiy and Stordoc. If you are in any way involved in document management, or looking to automate more of your document management processes - and which company isn't? - then you won't want to miss this important discussion.
Businessman, entrepreneur, deal maker and advisor Duarte da Silva joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral podcast for a wide-ranging discussion about South Africa's IT industry, with a specific focus on Dimension Data. Da Silva recently posted a heartfelt tribute on LinkedIn to Jeremy Ord, Dimension Data's co-founder, who resigned last month as executive chairman after 34 years. The post has since gone somewhat viral. In the podcast, Da Silva talks about his days as a director and analyst at Merrill Lynch, where he covered Dimension Data and companies such as Persetel (headed at the time by Roux Marnitz), Q Data (the late Piet den Boer) and Altron (Bill Venter). Da Silva recalls some of the colourful characters at the time and how they helped shape South Africa's early IT industry - and why the country, curiously, was the only one in the world where Japan's Hitachi has a bigger share in mainframes than IBM. (Hint: It had to do with sanction and Marnitz's love of aviation.) He also talks about his first encounter with Ord, how Dimension Data attracted and cultivated top leaders - including Richard Came, David Frankel, Alon Apteker, Malcolm Rutherford and many others - who went on to great business success - and recounts a tale about a greulling, three-week investor road show in the US. The conversation then turns to the dot-com bust of 2000, how a US acquisition at the peak of the dot-com bubble severely hobbled Dimension Data and how the shifting sands of the IT sector - and a greater appreciation for technology among business leaders - led to tough years for the group. Da Silva, who now serves as chairman of Huge Group, also touches on Huge's pursuit of Adapt IT, why he's enjoying being back in the IT sector and what he plans to do in the coming years. Don't miss this riveting discussion!
In today’s episode, TechCentral is joined by Praven Pillay, MD of Maxtec, and Andrew Parker, chief technology officer of Teknov8, to talk about the modern threat landscape. Pillay has 25 years’ IT experience under the belt and is well known in the South African technology market for managing a tight team. Parker is a South African now based in London who spends his time between consulting, architecting and commenting on IT solutions. Between them, they have many years of cybersecurity knowledge, and both have dived headlong into Acronis Cyber Protect. This lively discussion led to both thought leadership and a product exploration with a security focus. Parker is quick to point out that “the crooks know as much about you as you allow them to”, meaning our online lives are happy hunting grounds for hackers and other criminals. The sheer volume of threat management required today means that intuitive views of the network are simply not good enough, and the ever-changing environments require a higher level of enterprise protection. This, hand in hand with constant training of staff to be aware of and alert to potential threats, is the first step in good management. But, as Parker points out, defence is 99.9% effective, leaving a 0.1% vulnerability where a break can occur -- and that’s what companies need to be ready for. “It is not if, but when, the bad guys get through your firewall. The success is determined by how quickly you identify, isolate and respond to the threat,” said Pillay. Listen to this podcast to hear how Acronis Cyber Protect can take the worry out of waging war against cybercriminals, what free giveaway Maxtec is offering to customers, and an exciting announcement! Don’t miss this power-packed episode.
Gerhard Olivier’s passion for technology shines through. As manager of consulting services at First Technology, he’s well positioned to talk on both the technology challenges and solutions to solve them. First Technology has a long history with Hewlett Packard Enterprises’ Aruba Networks, and Olivier is passionate about the company’s offerings. He speaks of Aruba’s Aruba Central tools as being like the monitoring heart of an organisation from which legs of work can operate in an environment of “Zero Trust”. Oliver says Aruba’s ClearPass network access control solution provides visibility into and intelligence to both managed and unmanaged networks, which allows for control up to the edge. In the podcast, Olivier explores deployment realities and commercial options as well as some of the pitfalls that clients face when they’re not using a central management solution. “You are only as good as your last restore,” he says. Don’t miss the discussion!
Containerisation has moved on from something that was spoken about at geek conventions to mainstream development. Gartner has predicted that 85% of global businesses will be running containers in production by 2022, up from 35% in 2019. It has become clear that organisations that want to remain agile and future-proof their applications have made their decision: to containerise. This means that the focus has shifted to the actual Kubernetes orchestration. In this TechCentral roundtable discussion, experts came together to discuss how to navigate the journey to empowering an organisation with cloud-native technologies and enabling it to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments, such as public, private and hybrid clouds. For more, please visit techcentral.co.za. * This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned
Personal security is a topic of interest for all South Africans. In this podcast, a panel of guests from Ava Security and Vumacam explore the convergence of video, predictive analytics and human interaction to fight crime. Gavin Hill, CIO of Vumacam, explains that large-scale CCTV deployments are complex IT challenges that involve connectivity, bandwidth and storage. Vumacam CEO Ricky Croock said this overarching web of information forms a glue that can connect private sector security companies and public policing to catch criminals. Ava Security co-founder and head of engineering Sam Lancia touches on advancements in artificial intelligence and how these can extend the reach of a security operator from a centralised point. With more than 120 000 hours of video being produced every day by Vumacam, human reviews simply cannot keep pace. Traditional analytics needs to be enhanced by modern technology, Lancia said. With the continuously falling price of storage, better connectivity and massive strides in AI, the predictive security space is an area to watch with interest. Enjoy the discussion!
The TechCentral podcast often focuses on large enterprises. Today, though, we’re doing a deep dive into the world of small and medium enterprise solutions. Nicolas Blank, CEO of NBConsult, has a long history of providing customer-focused solutions across Africa, the UK and Hong Kong. His mantra is to focus on simple solutions that work. “We innovate to enable our clients in practical ways,” he said. This led to NBCube, a recent addition to NBConsult’s portfolio that offers SMEs an affordable backup solution with the features that most people would expect to get only at the enterprise level. “If you don’t want to be eating pizza at 3am while trying to restore critical data, speak to us.” From order to operation, NBCube is enabled in hours, giving peace of mind to customers who have better things to do than worry about losing data. This podcast dives into the world of data backup and what it means for South African businesses. “A backup is only a backup if it can be restored.” Enjoy the discussion!
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to Calvin Collett, MD at MTN-owned Internet service provider Supersonic, about its new Air Fibre uncapped broadband product launched this month. Collett unpacks what Air Fibre is exactly -- it uses unlicensed frequency bands to deliver guaranteed download speeds of up to 100Mbit/s -- and where Supersonic is planning to roll out the technology and why. Where does it fit into the market, especially next to fibre and 5G technologies? What is the size of the potential market? What about signal interference? And symmetry in the speeds? And does it need line of site to a tower? Collett answers all these questions and more in the podcast. Don't miss the discussion!
Rudi Potgieter, executive head of Guardian Eye at Vox, joins the podcast to talk about Vox ICE, a product which is saving lives through an innovative, low- cost technology solution. The current global economic environment is pulling young workers away from their homes and leaving the elderly behind. Vox ICE is a solution to ensure they are not alone. Vox ICE, or “in case of emergency”, takes care of your loved ones without being present, with the ultimate home care monitoring system, Potgieter explains in the podcast. The solution comprises non-intrusive sensors and specialised algorithms to detect any abnormal behaviour for relatively healthy seniors living on their own. The algorithm detects the person’s day-to-day behaviour over a period of time, establish their routine, and detect any abnormalities. Potgieter explains how the ICE solution works – it requires little user setup, maintenance or management. It is built to service “born before computers” customers, giving their loved ones comfort that they are being looked after.
Amazon Web Services already has a team of 7 000 people in South Africa, most of them based in Cape Town, but the US cloud computing giant is not done hiring as it ramps up investment in the country. That’s according to Clive Charlton, head of solution architecture for AWS in sub-Saharan Africa, who explains in the podcast why South Africa – and Cape Town specifically – were so attractive to the Seattle-headquartered leader in hyperscale cloud services originally and why it remains so. In the podcast, Charlton talks about how Amazon built the elastic computing cloud, or EC2, in Cape Town and how this platform went on to become the underpinnings of what AWS is today. He also explains why Amazon is moving into a new campus in Cape Town – the data centres won’t be coming along – and whether it has plans to establish offices and data centre infrastructure elsewhere in the country. Don’t miss the discussion!
Lee Williams, Veritas product manager at Axiz, joins TechCentral podcast host Daniel Robus to share insights into the ever-changing world of backup and recovery in the cloud. Williams plays an important role as the link between Veritas, partners and customers, which affords her a good vantage to see what’s working and what’s not. She says that the most important advice to customers is for them to “ask many questions of their partners, vendors and suppliers”, as there are often solutions available that simply are not used and could solve many issues if people know about them. Williams makes reference to a local partner and their ability to turn around a failed audit through a quick deployment of the Veritas solution. When asked if ransomware is a real threat, Williams said, “I know of a company that has been held to ransom twice in the past year.” With Veritas driving the focus on NetBackup SaaS Protection, the future looks exciting in the world of backup and recovery. Enjoy the discussion!
On 1 April, the department of communications & digital technologies quietly published a draft national data and cloud policy that has potentially far-reaching implications for the private sector, state-owned enterprises and the public sector broadly. Among other objectives, the draft policy document - which could lead to legislative amendments or even a new act of parliament - seeks to promote South Africa's data sovereignty and security as well as enhance investment opportunities, create jobs and enhance skills development. But it also raises concerns, among them that the policy-making process will eventually create additional regulatory burdens for the private sector while concentrating government cloud business in the public sector to the detriment of private cloud and data service providers. The draft policy document also raises a number of questions around black economic empowerment. Bowmans partners Heather Irvine (who specialists in competition law) and Livia Dyer (ICT policy) join the TechCentral podcast to unpack the importance of the draft policy document, where their concerns with it lie, and what it means for South African companies. Questions that Irvine and Dyer answer include: * Do we really need additional legislation, or even amended legislation, to cater for data centres and cloud services? * Does the Cybercrimes Bill not already deal with some of the issues raised by the department of communications? * If the policy is implemented as it stands, will it reduce competition and harm or exclude private sector players? * Will the draft policy create additional red tape for companies and will it actually help with investment in this space? Don't miss the discussion!
Boston is known for its beauty, Fenway Park, the Boston marathon, and that pub from Cheers. It’s also the home of an executive with the one of the coolest titles ever, “Driving the buzz at CallMiner”. In this podcast, Brian LaRoche joined us for an early morning discussion, talking about all things contact centre and more. LaRoche gives an insightful view into a company that is making significant strides in the contact centre world. He says that “feedback is a gift that should be treated as such” and emphasises the importance of listening as a management skill. CallMiner has even named its annual user conference “Listen” because of the importance of, well, listening. In the podcast, LaRoche draws inspiration from a new study that CallMiner commissioned from Forrester, “The New Contact Centre Empowers its People with Customer Intelligence” and provides advice to contact centre managers and C-level executives considering investing in the exciting area of interaction analytics. The automation of the mundane is giving rise to the “super-agent”, who needs to be empowered to lead client interactions in an empathetic way, irrespective of the client channel or the agent’s location. Seventy percent of respondents in the Forrester study agree that good customer-agent experience often de-escalates a bad brand experience. Listen to your agents, train your agents and give them feedback on how they are performing. It’s worth it! With CallMiner continually expanding its artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities to show, in context, trending as well as stronger real-time analytics, it’s an exciting time in the contact centre business. Enjoy the discussion! * This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned
EskomsePush is by far South Africa's most popular smartphone application for checking load shedding schedules. Herman Maritz, co-creator of the app with Dan Wells, joins the TechCentral podcast to chat about what's next. In the podcast, Maritz explains how the idea for the app came about - including its name - and some of the challenges he and Wells faced in developing it on a shoe-string budget. He talks about the usage patterns on the app, including how it spikes massively when Eskom announces load shedding and the challenges involved in the backend in ensuring it stays up when this happens (hint: hyperscale cloud services have helped enormously). The conversation covers why Google took the app out of the Play store (on a Sunday!), why ensuring the right schedules are loaded in the app is a time-consuming and extremely complex process (even with automation), and what's next for the app. Don't miss this conversation with the co-developer of one of South Africa's most-used apps.
Two brothers decided to take a gap in the managed service provider (MSP) market six years ago and have not looked back since. Dean Horsten (chief technology officer) and Dylan Horsten (CEO) head up MySky Networks, a Cape Town-based MSP that is making waves in the small and medium enterprise market. MySky holds Aruba Networks Platinum Status, one of only two partners in South Africa to enjoy that position, and Dean Hortsen also serves as the Aruba ambassador for South Africa. This podcast interview with the brothers touches on a wide range of topics, including what it’s like to start a business with family; how focus brings results; and key tips to choosing an MSP. * Specific questions tackled in the podcast include: * What’s on the horizon for Aruba; * Three tips on choosing the right MSP for your business; * Why offering office hours support may be better than a 24x7 option; and * How an opex-based service helps SMEs in this time of tight cash flow and an uncertain future. Don’t miss the discussion! For more information about MySky Networks contact Dylan on dylan@myskynetworks.com. * This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned
SUSE chief technology officer for enterprise cloud products Rob Knight believes Kubernetes technology is such a big deal that it could be considered “the next Linux”. Speaking to Daniel Robus on the TechCentral podcast, Knight provides an informative dive into the world of containerisation and mass digitisation, and the management thereof. Knight takes podcast listeners through a crash course in “Kubernetes 101” and explains how containerisation technology is already in the mainstream development world, touching multiple systems and enabling business value for organisations. Why should organisations try the technology? How is SUSE supporting a low-risk or no-risk entry into containerisation? And where can development teams get training, information and shortcuts to value from the community? Knight answers all these questions and more in the podcast. He also provides real-world examples of the technology in action, including in in-flight entertainment systems, the fast-food sector and banking. Kubernetes is here to stay, customers should embrace it and not be nervous of the change, and open-source software is a game changer to enable rapid deployment of digital-ready solutions, he says. Don’t miss the discussion!
Getting customer experience (CX) right could mean the difference between surviving and thriving, says Maxime Blanchard, Zendesk territory manager for South Africa, in this episode of the podcast. In this podcast, Blanchard and Zendesk commercial account executive for Africa Erica Hall discuss the company’s recently published CX Report and its findings regarding CX in South Africa and the continent. They explore how Zendesk is humanising CX, how customers are struggling to unlock the best of CX and where the areas of untapped potential sit within an organisation that is on a digital transformation journey. Topics discussed in the podcast include: * The most notable trends in the Zendesk CX report; * Where companies are getting CX right in South Africa and where are they getting it wrong; * How Zendesk helps remove obstacles in the CX evolution of companies; * Why Blanchard and Hall are both passionate about the African market opportunity; * What they’re seeing as the game changer for clients to focus on for the next quarter; * What the next exciting things are coming out of Zendesk; and * Zendesk “customer happiness formula” event on 7 April. Don’t miss the discussion.
This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned.
To keep appraised of all regulatory issues in South Africa while digitally transforming is often arduous. Simply paying attention is no longer enough, which is why regulatory technology, or regtech, now plays a crucial role and can significantly assist in ensuring all digital transformation projects are successful and compliant. That's the view of Andrea Tucker, head of research & development and strategic projects at e4, who was a guest on the TechCentral podcast. In the podcast, Tucker talks about e4 and its areas of focus before turning to the subject of regtech and what the short- and long-term benefits are of embracing a regtech strategy. Has the Covid-19 pandemic put extra pressure on companies to embrace a digital approach to regulation? If so, what’s driving it? Also, regulation is a broad field. Should companies be applying regtech to every aspect of their business where regulation happens to play a role? Tucker answers these questions as well as touching on which industries are doing regtech well, including a look at the banking space in South Africa. What is the impact of privacy legislation like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation and South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act in the regtech field? And how are shifting consumer habits since the start of the pandemic affecting regtech strategies and why? Don't miss the discussion!
With ever-escalating electricity prices and an unstable supply of power from the national energy utility, more and more South African consumers and businesses are looking to invest in solar. But what’s involved? In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to Tian van der Bijl, commercial division manager at Ellies, about the costs involved and the requirements that must be met to go the solar route – including going off-grid entirely. Given Eskom's endless supply problems, why don't more homes and businesses already have solar? What factors, if any, are holding back the adoption of the technology as an energy-supply solution in South Africa? And how expensive (or cheap) is it really to deploy? And when should users expect a payback from their investment? Van der Bijl tackles all of these questions and talks about what businesses can do to reduce the upfront cost of deploying solar. He also covers what homeowners need to consider before embarking on a solar installation and what some of the traps are that people fall into. Should those interested in solar deploy projects in a big-bang approach, or does a modular and phased implementation of solar make more sense? Other areas covered in the discussion include lithium-ion vs lead-acid batteries for energy storage and what the latest developments are in solar panel technology. Lastly, Van der Bijl talks about Ellies' solar solutions and how the company works with homeowners and businesses to deploy solar energy solutions. Don’t miss this fascinating discussion!
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to representatives from Digital Generation (DG) and HP about the impact that Covid-19 has had on the local IT industry and how it's shifted conversations with end-user customers. DG marketing and sales specialist Michelle Budde kicks off the conversation with a look at how her company adopted to the Covid-19 and the associated lockdowns. She then talks about some of the challenges the industry has faced in securing stock in the past year. Budde also covers DG's black empowerment credentials and its relationships with global original equipment manufacturers, including HP. Ricardo Duarte, senior technical consultant at HP, then joins the discussion in the second half of the podcast to talk about HP's direction since the break-up of Hewlett-Packard to create HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Duarte then has a look at what the largest enterprise users in South Africa are talking about today, a year into the Covid pandemic, and what some of the hottest topics are on their agendas, including cybersecurity. He then unpacks HP Analytics and why this is relevant in today’s climate of working from home - how can endpoint data analytics could help organisations deal with distantly connected users and ultimately the user experience? Don't miss the conversation!
Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) was recently awarded Top Employer status in South Africa for 2021 by the Top Employers Institute. But how did the company win this highly valued accolade? In this promoted episode of the TechCentral podcast, DFA chief human capital officer Portia Thokoane and the company's head of strategy and mergers & acquisitions, Vino Govender, unpack what was involved in achieving the Top Employers award. With headquarters in the Netherlands and offices in several countries around the world – including South Africa – the Top Employers Institute was established with the aim of promoting excellence in human capital management to support business strategy. DFA's efforts in this regard were led by Thokoane, who believes human capital had become increasingly acknowledged as a critical business differentiator. She believes that organisations that give adequate attention to this area of their businesses will continue to distinguish themselves from those that do not. In the podcast, Thokoane and Govender talk about the work that was done at DFA to secure the award, including how it identified factors crucial to employee engagement and development and applied those across the organisation. Thokoane also provides her views in the podcast on the big trends in the human resources industry in 2021 and beyond. Don't miss the discussion!
In this final episode in this week's series of podcasts with executives from iOCO, the systems integrator in the EOH Holdings stable, TechCentral speaks to Brian Harding and Richard Vester about the company's local and international expertise in software development and cloud computing. Picking up on the focus of the podcast series -- namely, the great African tech opportunity -- Harding, who is managing executive for iOCO digital, international and regions, unpacks the the size of the opportunity and where South Africa fits into the picture. Vester -- who is group executive for cloud -- then provides an overview of iOCO's cloud business and its go-to-market approach. Harding turns to the four key components he believes companies must get right if they want to be successful at digital transformation, namely software, design, agility and interconnect. The discussion also covers South Africa's opportunity to become a much bigger outsourcing destination. What will it take to get this right as a country? Don't miss the discussion, and this wrap to an insightful series of podcasts.
In the fourth episode in TechCentral's s podcast showcase with iOCO, the systems integrator in the EOH Holdings stable, TechCentral speaks to Colin Millar about the rapidly growing importance to business of APIs, or application programming interfaces. In the podcast, Millar, who is MTN MAD API and Chenosis partner executive at iOCO, unpacks why APIs are becoming so important in modern business and how telecommunications operators like MTN Group as well as fintech players and e-commerce providers can access value-added revenue streams through the clever use of APIs. The conversation then turns to the extensive work that iOCO has done with MTN to develop the MAD API platform and the Chenosis API marketplace and the significance thereof for developers and businesses across the African continent. In the podcast, Millar also unpacks: * Why modern companies are becoming platform businesses and how, through these platforms, enabled by APIs, businesses can interconnect their partner ecosystems and find new routes to market; * How, through APIs, businesses can distribute their services more widely, integrate with powerful third-party apps, create new products and offer personalised customer service; and * How APIs have developed, allowing for more apps - and even APIs themselves - to interact in different ways. Don't miss the interview and the others in this series with iOCO.
Egypt is on the rise. Since the "Arab Spring" a decade ago, the North African country has been on an upward march and is becoming an important centre for technology innovation. That's the view of Essam Elbadri, founder and CEO of Asset Technology Group, a company today owned by South Africa's EOH Holdings. In the third episode in a podcast series with executives from iOCO, the systems integrator in the EOH stable, Elbadri unpacks how the technology sector has helped Egypt grow strongly in recent years. The conversation covers some of the country's initiatives to grow the ICT sector and the economy, including the ICT 2030 strategy, the New Admistrative Capital smart city and the development of technology parks. Elbadri also talks about why iOCO is excited about the Egyptian market and why it invested in Asset Technology Group. Don't miss the discussion!
South Africa's nuvoteQ, which is part of the iOCO stable, is making waves in the global medical technology space with a focus on delivering software-as-a-service solutions to the clinical research industry. In this, the second in a series of podcast interviews with executives from iOCO, the systems integrator in the EOH Holdings stable, TechCentral speaks to Adriaan Kruger, co-founder and CEO of medtech specialist nuvoteQ, about opportunities in the rest of Africa and further abroad. In the podcast, Kruger outlines nuvoteQ key focus areas, talks about how the Covid-19 pandemic has placed an emphasis on the need for a robust, reliable healthcare system in Africa, and how homegrown companies such as nuvoteQ can apply technology to enhance the reputation of Africa's clinical research industry. Don't miss the discussion!
Africa is ripe with opportunities for technology-led distruption and tech companies with the right approach to this vast market stand to benefit. That's the view of EOH Holdings CEO Stephen van Coller, who introduces a series of TechCentral podcasts this week with executives from iOCO, the systems integrator in the EOH group. From Cape Town to Cairo, Van Coller unpacks why he believes Africa’s economic renaissance could be fuelled by the growth of tech, with countries such as Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt and Kenya leading the way. The continent is already attracting investments from global tech giants such as Google and Facebook, while China is leading investments in Africa’s tech infrastructure. But what are some of the opportunities and the hurdles and what is the role of the public and private sectors in overcoming these? With the right enabling policies, improvements in infrastructure, a focus on education and training, and the explosion of tech hubs, coupled with a young population, and a focus on entrepreneurship and innovation, the picture is brighter than many might imagine. In this opening podcast of the series, Van Coller touches on iOCO's view of the opportunities based on its own findings and on-the-ground experiences. Don't miss this insightful podcast series!
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to Brenton Swanepoel, head of the technical team at Obscure Technologies South Africa, about why humans remain the weakest link in the information security chain and what can be done about it. The discussion kicks off with a look at some of the recent high-profile data leaks and data breaches that have hit local and international companies and the sort of attacks that are being mounted by hackers and why. When it comes to the human factor, what are the best ways of minimising the impact of weak security practices, including employees choosing easy-to-guess passwords or otherwise doing things that expose their organisations to attack? The conversation also touches on some of the solutions Obscure Technologies offers to help companies protect themselves and emphasises why user education remains a critical component in the information security toolbox. Don’t miss the discussion!
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to executives from Dimension Data and Cisco about the exciting new area of information security called SASE, or Secure Access Service Edge. Pronounced "sassy" and coined by research firm Gartner, SASE is a big focus for both Cisco and its partner Dimension Data. In short, SASE is the convergence of wide-area networking and cloud security services into a single, cloud-delivered service model. It has been described as the future of cloud security. In the podcast, Dimension Data senior solutions architect Brynmor Campos and Cisco consulting systems engineer, Security Solutions, at Cisco Greg Griessel discuss what SASE is, why it's garnering significant focus in IT security discussions and what it means for South African organisations. Griessel and Campos unpack how Covid-19 and the associated work-from-home measures have made the transition to a new security model more urgent. Don't miss this important discussion!
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral's Duncan McLeod interviews Clayton Hayward, CEO of fintech platform provider Ukheshe Technologies, about its acquisition from Mastercard of Oltio. The deal, announced late last year, sees Ukheshe buying a company that developed the digital payments platform that supports Masterpass, Mastercard's QR payment service. Masterpass allows consumers to pay with their bank card by scanning a QR code with their mobile phone. In the podcast, Hayward tells McLeod about Ukheshe, what the company does and where it fits into the fintech ecosystem in South Africa. He then explains the rationale for buying Oltio. Ukheshe has an established partnership with Mastercard and is a participant in the company's Accelerate programme, which offers an access point to tap into Mastercard technology, data, expertise and global network that helps companies scale globally. Ukheshe will continue to provide the same support to local banks and other service providers that currently offer Masterpass, ensuring business continuity with no impact to consumers or merchants. Don't miss the interview!
As companies move IT from on-premises environments into the cloud, many assume it is sufficient to allow their cloud vendor to manage their backups for them. This is absolutely not the case, according to Keepit co-founder and CEO Frederik Schouboe, who explains in this episode of the TechCentral podcast why it's crucial that companies ensure they have a proper backup plan in place for their software-as-a-service (SaaS) and other cloud-based tools. Keepit, which is represented in South Africa by Cactus Backup, recently announced a large series-A investment round from One Peak. In the podcast, Schouboe talks about the investment and what Keepit intends to use it for. The podcast then turns to Keepit's offerings and how SaaS backup differs from the sort of backups companies used to run when their IT infrastructure was on-premises. Keepit has its own data centres, separate from the hyperscale providers such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services -- Schouboe explains in the podcast why this is important and delves into the regulatory implications in choosing a cloud backup provider. He also takes podcast listeners through his views on the South African market and its growth potential as well as Keepit's partnership with Cactus Backup. Don't miss the discussion!
Businesses are sitting on a gold mine in the vast quantities of data in their organisations, yet most are not yet taking full advantage of the power of artificial intelligence, machine learning and cloud technologies to turn these data repositories into real value. In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral interviews Microsoft South Africa Enterprise and Cloud Business Group lead Johannes "JK" Kanis on how modern technologies can help companies use their data to gain real business insights. In the podcast, Kanis talks about the potential upside for businesses that can get this right - how they can take advantage of modern AI tools to get to grips with their data and start to turn it into something of significant value. Kanis explains how Micosoft's Azure Synapse Analytics offering, which recently became "generally available", can help companies tame their data sets and why he believes the media, telecommunications and insurance industries in South Africa are doing better than others in this area. Also in the podcast, Kanis talks about whether a focus on advanced technology is enough, or whether a cultural change is also needed if companies are going to take full advatntage of AI, ML and cloud. Plus, how does Microsoft South Africa help local companies wanting to take full advantage of the data they own? And how does the Open Data Initiative, founded by Microsoft, SAP and Adobe, help? Don't miss the discussion!
The concept of "everything as a service", or XaaS, is rapidly gaining favour among companies as they look to control IT costs and improve efficiencies in a post-pandemic world. In this episode of the podcast - the second in a series of two with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Aptronics - HPE GreenLake country lead Rachel Cooke and Aptronics pre-sales strategic consultant Mark Wayne explain why XaaS is one of the hottest concepts in enterprise IT. Cooke begins the conversation by talking about the advantages of the "as-a-service" model and why it's particularly pertinent in tough economic times. Wayne then discusses how it can be used to eliminate waste and inefficiency in organisations. HPE has announced that it plans to move fully to XaaS by 2022 - Cooke explains the rationale for the move and how the model supports the "new normal", which includes remote work as a standard. The discussion then turns to HPE's GreenLake solution, how it works and what it can do for companies as they get ready to usher in 2021.
In this episode of the podcast, Rachel Cooke, GreenLake country lead at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Mark Wayne, pre-sales strategic consultant at Aptronics, unpack the challenges around choosing the right cloud platform. Cooke kicks off the conversation with a view on how Covid-19 has accelerated cloud discussions in enterprises across South Africa. Wayne then talks about what companies should be considering when choosing a cloud partner. Cooke says most organisations are choosing some sort of hybrid model. She explains why, and how HPE's GreenLake solution can help companies manage cloud complexity, whether it's on premises on elsewhere. Wayne then explains how GreenLake is positioned to meet the demands of modern enterprises. * This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to Mimecast director of sales engineering for the Middle East & Africa Brian Pinnock about what companies should know – and be doing – about the Protection of Personal Information (Popi) Act and Europe’s GDPR rules. How seriously should companies be taking this legislation, especially since many are struggling to cope with the tough economic environment caused by the lockdowns of 2020? Is it something companies can safely ignore for now? And does it only affect big companies? Pinnock explains what the consequences are of ignoring the provisions of the Popi Act and why company leaders should be paying proper attention to the obligations it places on them – and be doing so before the legislation comes into full force in mid-2021. Companies have many data repositories on-premises, in the cloud, in e-mail, in databases, in ERP systems. How can they ensure everything is as secure as possible against a breach or attack of some sort? What about cloud storage, and can companies simply leave compliance to their cloud provider? Pinnock unpacks all of this in the podcast and explains what must happen next. Don’t miss this important discussion!
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral delves into what smaller enterprises need to know about cloud computing, with ESET cybersecurity specialist Gabriel le Roux. In the podcast, Le Roux explains that, with the advent of broadband Internet access, small businesses can -- but often aren't -- taking advantage of the cloud to their streamline operations, improve efficiencies and reduce costs. Le Roux unpacks the advantages of cloud computing, including for backup, storage, hosting and accessing software applications delivered as a service. The conversation then shifts to what companies need to know to ensure they are protected in the cloud from a security perspective. Don't miss the discussion!
Maxime Blachard is a French former pro-football player who played as defender and defensive midfielder for various teams. Today, though, he's more on the offensive -- in the technology space, where, as South African territory manager for Zendesk, he is passionate about customer experience (CX). Zendesk recently completed a research report on the South African market, looking at what local companies are doing in terms of CX projects, and where they're excelling and where they aren't. In this podcast interview with TechCentral, Blanchard unpacks key questions such as: * What is CX and why is it important? * What are the key takeways from the Zendesk report? * What are the building blocks of a good CX plan? * Why is it obvious to customers when companies do CX right? * How closely tied is CX to profitable business success? * Are there specific things peculiar to the South African market when it comes to CX, and what does it take to be a CX champion in South Africa? * How does one measure success in CX? * Which South African companies are getting it right? Blanchard also touches on the compatibility between sport and the business world and muses on whether pro sports is a good place to learn about business. Don't miss the discussion!
It has been an extraordinary year, often for all the wrong reasons. And not just because the world was hit by a global pandemic, but because of the ways the associated lockdowns have changed the world of work and, for many companies, their IT spending priorities. In some instances, companies have had to divert funding just to keep the lights on, or to keep their employees productive at home. But for others it has meant shifting gears on digital transformation. Businesses also need to – and have had to – change their mindsets in terms of how they fund their technology assets and realise that just because they have followed the traditional finance route in the past does not mean it is the right strategy for today. Anton Pauw, finance area manager for HPE Financial Services, and Jonathan Kropf, CEO of Velocity Group, explore this subject in more detail in this podcast with TechCentral. They kick off the conversation by talking about why the subject of IT financing should be a priority for all organisations today. Covid-19 has accelerated digital transformation strategies, yet the digital transformation journey can very costly. What is the solution? The answer may lie in consumption-based models that give enterprises an alternative means of paying for assets, while offering flexibility and ensuring the right technology mix. Pauw and Kropf talk about how the landscape has changed since the pandemic started and why companies should be looking at consumption-based IT models now more than ever.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are becoming important tools in fighting cyber threats, but why, and what are the short- and long-term implications? In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to Kaspersky enterprise cybersecurity advisor Lehan van den Heever about how AI and ML can be used in the fight against cyberattackers, and how cyberattackers, in turn, could employ these tools against those fighting them. Van den Heever kicks off the discussion by talking about how the Covid-19 pandemic has shaped the world of cybersecurity in 2020 and what it means for enterprises. He then defines AI and ML and how they can be applied in the battle against security threats. How can AI tools be used in practice, and what are some real-world examples? And where, if both sides are using these advanced tools, will the situation end up? Are we headed for a world in a decade or two's time in which AIs are unleashed on each other with little or no human involvement? The discussion also touches on how AI and ML can be used to determine behavioural changes that could be malicious as well as used to improve a company's defences. It's a fascinating discussion of interest to anyone involved in the information security space.
Pieter de Villiers began his career as an optometrist, but quickly pivoted into the world of technology entrepreneurship when he realised running a retail store was not his cup of tea. Today, the business he co-founded with his twin brother Casper and two others -- Danie du Toit and Patrick Lawson -- is chasing down US$1-billion in annual revenue and is helping invent the fledgling world of "chat commerce". De Villiers joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral podcast to talk about Clickatell's journey, including the early days of the business, how it raised funding from Sequoia Capital -- becoming the first African company to successfully get funding from the storied venture capital firm -- and why he spent 10 years living in Silicon Valley, only to return to South Africa in 2015. He talks about how Clickatell helped WhatsApp in the early days become the messaging giant it is today (co-founder Jan Koum was a fan of the Clickatell technology) and how the company has used WhatsApp as a basis to build solutions in the fields of chat banking and chat commerce. He also talks about Clickatell's future plans and comments on whether an IPO is in the offing. Don't miss the discussion!
For the past two years, Stephen van Coller has been holding down one of the toughest CEO jobs in South Africa -- attempting to lead IT services group EOH Holdings out of dire straits. The former MTN Group executive, who joined EOH in September 2018, has been fighting a corruption storm since early 2019, when TechCentral first published details of why Microsoft terminated partner agreements with the JSE-listed firm. Since then, its law firm, ENSafrica has uncovered shocking evidence of malfeasance in EOH's public sector business unit. In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod asks Van Coller about his past two years at EOH, the impact it's had on him personally, why he chose to be so transparent about the corruption, and what happens next. Van Coller also talks about EOH's 2020 full-year financial results, which were published on Wednesday, and why he believes the group is now on the mend. Don't miss the discussion!
The world changed dramatically in 2020, thanks for the Covid-19 pandemic. Digital transformation strategies are being fast-tracked and businesses are being forced to update their infrastructure to accommodate a mobile workforce. But none of this is easy. Cloud is a key component of this change, with companies having to choose appropriate platforms (public, private, hybrid), coupled with intelligent, self-managing storage. They also require a cloud platform that's agile and flexible, to heighten innovation and competitiveness without incurring massive cost. Furthermore, businesses have to maintain their IT infrastructure, particularly in data centres, which play a central role in cloud and digital transformation strategies, and which require on-site support. The hard lockdown and social distancing rules had a huge ripple effect on this type of support, highlighting the need for modern infrastructure that does not require as much on-site support and physical intervention. In this podcast, Chris Bamber, MD at SYSDBA, and Stephan Steyn, solutions architect at HPE South Africa, address these issues and provide advice for businesses that are grappling with 2020's big IT challenges. In short, they explain why a hybrid cloud environment that offers a pay-as-you-use model with intelligent storage features can address the current challenges that businesses face.
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to Dimension Data executives about how improving the customer experience (CX) in banking, using technology, can help banks do better by their clients. Dimension Data Middle East & Africa executive for intelligent customer experience Nompumelelo Mokou and the company's head of sales in the intelligence customer experience go-to-market practice, Bruce Lambourne, explain in the podcast how banks are being severely challenged by disruption, especially technology-led disruption. They talk about how banks are having to adapt to consumers who now expect effortless, on-demand engagement and hyper-personalisation. In the podcast, Mokou and Lambourne discuss: * What the bank of the future will look like; * How the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted debt recovery rates in the banking sector and how Dimension Data can assist from a technology perspective in this regard; * How banks can remain relevant in a complex and rapidly changing world, especially those that still have a lot of legacy computing infrastructure; * How Dimension Data can assist in optimising performance in the banking sector; and * Why hyper-personalisation has become essential for modern banks. The NTT Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report (CXBR) referenced during the podcast discussion is available here: https://hello.global.ntt/en-us/insights/2020-global-cx-benchmarking-report
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral talks to African Bank CIO Penny Futter and the bank's executive of credit and data science, Vere Millican, about their decision to deploy advanced speech analytics software from CallMiner. Frank Sherlock, CallMiner's vice-president for international markets, joins the podcast to talk about the company and how speech analytics and interaction analytics software works and what it can do for clients. Futter begins the conversation with an overview of African Bank, how big it is and its target market. She then explains how the investment in CallMiner's Eureka speech analytics platform supports the bank's business strategy. Millican then explains how the CallMiner relationship come to be and why the bank chose the company's solutions. He explains what African Bank is able to do with the technology and what they're hoping to achieve with the technology in the near term. Sherlock explains how speech analytics and interaction analytics can help companies in their digital transformation journeys, before wrapping up the discussion by talking about where he sees the relationship with African Bank going in future.
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to NetApp product manager at Comstor Southern Africa Lyndsey Chiinze about “hybrid cloud infrastructure”, or HCI, and why it’s become critically important in digital transformation projects. This is particularly true, Chiinze said, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and work-from-measures. In the podcast, Chiinze talks about end-user computing (EUC) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and why these are important concepts with millions of people working from home and, in future, as employees continue to work remotely from a multitude of locations. She covers where HCI fits into a discussion on cloud computing and how far South African companies are in their journeys.
What if South African companies could learn a thing or two from outgoing US President Donald Trump? Or, more specifically, the way his campaign team used technology to secure the controversial candidate the presidency in 2016? Karl Fischer, MD of the coastal region at software house DVT and the company's chief marketing officer and executive head of artificial intelligence and data, believes corporate South Africa should be doing just that. In this episode of the podcast, Fischer unpacks how Team Trump used analytics, social media, mobile technology and even cloud computing, to win the White House and why South African companies would be wise to pay attention as they look to harness digital transformation to maintain and grow their customer bases. It's a fascinating discussion. Don't miss it!
In this promoted episode of the podcast, TechCentral chats to FuseForward MD Premie Naicker about the proof of concept the Amazon Web Services partner is doing is involved with at the Da Vinci Institute. FuseForward, a Canadian company founded in Vancouver, opened its first office in South Africa about 18 months ago. It saw an opportunity to open an office in the country to coincide with the launch of Amazon Web Services' data centres in Cape Town. Education is a big focus for FuseForward and its contract with the Da Vinci Institute is significant, Naicker says in the podcast. Da Vinci's executive dean for research and institutional partnerships, HB Klopper, joins Naicker on the podcast to discuss the proof of concept and the impact it has had, especially during the Covid-19 lockdown. Taking remote, online-based education into home or into remote areas presents real challenges, Klopper says in the podcast, but the potential is there to amazing things using modern, cloud-based technology. But pivoting to online education is not simply about recording lectures and delivering these online, says Kloppers. Rather, there needs to be proper interactivity with students to ensure a rich exchange of ideas, which then facilitates learning. Naicker and Kloppers discuss the best practices coming out of solutions implemented in online education during Covid-19 and where the sector is going. * This promoted content was paid for by FuseForward
A new emerging markets-focused video streaming platform called Monsooq, developed by multinational media group Mondia, has been launched in South Africa, becoming the first market worldwide to get access. In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral's Duncan McLeod interviews Mondia chief commercial officer Paolo Rizzardini about why his company chose South Africa as its launchpad and talks about its expansion plans in the rest of Africa. Unlike Netflix, Showmax and other subscription-based streaming platforms, Moonsoq is time based, meaning users only pay when they're watching -- at a rate of R2 for every 30 minutes consumed. The platform also offers access to casual games on the same basis. Rizzardini explains why he believes this model will have huge appeal in South Africa and other emerging markets. For now, users must pay for access (after their first free hour's viewing) by using either a credit card or debit card, but Mondia is in talks with the mobile operators to introduce carrier billing, which Rizzardini says is important to attracting a mass-market audience. In the podcast, he talks about the content available on the platform, why a focus on local content is the company's top priority and its plans to offer live sports. Don't miss the discussion!
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to Maxtec MD Praven Pillay about the growing importance of cybersecurity, especially in the cloud, and the solutions the company offers the market. The conversation kicks off with a look at Maxtec's history and the role it plays in the IT ecosystem in South Africa and the broader African region. It then turns to Maxtec's relationship with Fortinet and its offerings in the information security space, particularly when it comes to securing cloud infrastructure, be it public cloud, private cloud or a hybrid environment. Pillay takes listeners and viewers through the Fortinet Cloud Security offering, looking at FortiGate next-generation firewalls, FortiSandbox, FortiManager, FortiWeb and FortMail. The conversation also touches on what companies have had to go through to secure a remote workforce through the Covid-19 pandemic and how Fortinet's solutions, through Maxtec, have helped clients and their employees forced to work from home. * This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned
In this episode of the TechCentral podcast, Duncan McLeod speaks to Myles Milston, CEO of London-based Globacap Technology, which has received a £4-million (R83-million) investment from the JSE. In addition to the investment, the JSE has signed a deal with Globacap to create a blockchain-based "private placements platform" to allow small and medium-sized firms to raise capital. Milston explains in the podcast how the platform will work (and how it differs from a stock exchange), when it will be launched and who it will be aimed at. Based on experience in other markets, technology companies, including start-ups, are likely to among the most active users of the platform, he said. The venture, the JSE said, will “enable the raising of infrastructure finance and allow small to medium-sized issuers to raise capital in South Africa”. Working with Globacap, the JSE will create a centralised platform, based on blockchain technology (developed by IBM), for issuers to raise capital "effectively and efficiently". Globacap’s platform provides fundraising management tools to automate private issuances in the equity and debt capital markets. It also offers second round liquidity capabilities that allow holders of equity or debt instruments to exit or syndicate their original investment, the JSE said. Through the partnership, the JSE intends to replicate and adapt Globacap’s offering across African markets, while reducing the execution risk of expanding into new markets and products. Don't miss the discussion!
Bank Zero is a new digital bank backed by former FNB CEO Michael Jordaan and launching in South Africa soon with a technology-led approach to financial services and low to zero fees. TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod spoke to the bank's co-founder and executive director Lezanne Human about Bank Zero's launch plans, who it plans to target, what it's doing to differentiate itself from its rivals, and what is involved in launching a new bank in South Africa from both a regulatory and technology perspective. In the podcast, Human explains why Bank Zero registered as a "mutual bank" and what that means, whether the South African market is big enough to support the raft of digital-focused banks that have launched or are launching soon, and why it sees entrepreneurs as key to its success. She also discusses Bank Zero's bank charges, which it unveiled last week, and why it regards low or zero fees for banking as important as it tries to disrupt the market. Don't miss the discussion!
Microsoft chief product officer Panos Panay is enthused about the future of the personal computer, arguing that PCs have never been more important as the world navigates the Covid-19 pandemic. In this exclusive South African interview with Panay, TechCentral talks to the man behind Microsoft's push into PC hardware in recent years, what impact the company's Surface products have had on the computer industry and why a software maker decided to get into the hardware game so aggressively. Microsoft, which recently launched its first Surface products in South Africa -- with the promise of more to come -- took a gamble when it decided to build its own computer hardware, in effect competing with its own original equipment manufacturing (OEM) partners such as Dell and HP. "To make a great product, you can't have great software without the hardware; you can't have great hardware without the software," Panay said. In the interview, Panay talks about his background and how he landed the Microsoft job in Seattle. He also answers some key questions, including: * How did Microsoft build a leading hardware business almost from scratch -- until then it had made mainly peripherals such as keyboards and webcams? * Has it been easier to build the Surface business under Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella than it would have been under Nadella's predecessors, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates (Ballmer still provides Panay with feedback on all new Surface devices); * What pushback was there from the PC industry and how did Microsoft deal with that? * Why did it take a software company to show hardware manufacturers what's possible in PC hardware? It's a great interview with a pioneer in the PC industry. Don't miss it!
NAPAfrica, the Internet exchange point (IXP) operated by data centre operator Teraco, has seen a 50% spike in peak traffic volumes in the past five months to 1.5Tbit/s, driven by the lockdown and work-from-home measures. In this episode of the podcast, Teraco technical lead for interconnection and peering Andrew Owens talks to TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the history of NAPAfrica and why Teraco decided to build it and allow companies to peer freely using the facilities. He explains why IXPs like NAPAfrica are important components of Internet plumbing and why NAPAfrica in particular has had a big impact on the efficiency, speed and cost of accessing Internet services in South Africa and the broader sub-Saharan Africa region. Owens then unpacks the traffic trends that have emerged since the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly how people are using the Internet differently today than they did before the lockdown. Don't miss the discussion!
Telkom dropped a bombshell on South Africa's telecommunications industry this week when it said it was approaching the Competition Commission to object to Vodacom's roaming agreements with Rain. But why? In this episode of the TechCentral podcast, Telkom group executive for regulatory affairs and government relations Siyabonga Mahlangu explains why the company has decided to fight an earlier decision by the Competition Commission and Icasa that the spectrum arrangements between Vodacom and Rain should not be considered a merger, and therefore not "notifiable" in terms of the Competition Act. "The Competition Commission took a narrow interpretation of what's going on. In our view, they focused on the technical integration and they did not look at the economic incentives between the parties... We also believe there was no detailed review of all the ex ante incentives and the mechanics of these arrangements and how they impact on the market structure and the dynamics of competition in the mobile sector," Mahlangu said. Asked why Telkom is approaching the tribunal now given that the commission and Icasa originally sanctioned the arrangement between Vodacom and Rain back in 2018, he said: "We have been engaging with both authorities without stopping since then... We have been pleading with them to reconsider this..." Mahlangu said the issue is not whether Vodacom and Rain should be allowed to reach the agreements they have but rather whether they should be required to go through merger control regulations so the situation can be "clarified". "This is Rain giving control of its spectrum and its radio-access network to a dominant operator. The only way in this country that kind of transaction would be regulated is through the Competition Act," he said. "The effect of these contractual arrangements is that they have committed Rain's productive capacity to serve Vodacom's needs over an extended period with an impact on the...
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral is joined by Brendon Ambrose, GM for data privacy, at technology company Atvance Intellect. In the podcast, Ambrose focuses specifically on the data privacy side of Atvance Intellect's business and what companies need to know about new legislation and regulations governing the protection of customer data, including Europe's GDPR and South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (Popia). With Popia coming into full force from next year, Ambrose explains what companies need to know about it and why he believes they shouldn't simply treat it as a compliance exercise but should rather use it as the basis for a full audit of their processes and systems to ensure they keep data privacy in mind in everything they do. With data breaches becoming more commonplace, what should companies know if they're affected by one? What will Popia mean for them when this happens, and how should they manage the risk? The conservation then turns to how companies, particularly larger ones, should manage data privacy as a function within the organisation, and who should the data protection officer report to and why? How does data protection compare to other areas of compliance that companies must already deal with? And can privacy legislation actually benefit a business if it approaches it in the right way? Ambrose answers all these questions and more in this podcast.
In this episode of the podcast, Introstat executive sales manager William du Preez talks about the benefits of businesses signing up with a managed print services partner. He talks about how doing so can save companies significant costs and improve their efficiency. Introstat was founded in 1989 and has about 160 employees at its offices in Gauteng, Durban and Cape Town. Du Preez talks about some of the big print challenges companies typically face and the conversations he has with new clients about how they can improve their print environments, cut down on wastage and reduce total cost of ownership. In the podcast, he explains how companies can achieve these benefits through, for example, the proactive servicing and maintenance of devices; device rationalisation and management; and the identification of paper-intensive processes. Don't miss the discussion. * This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned
South Africa has a new standard for electrical sockets and plugs. Known as SANS 164-2, the standard, developed by the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS), replaces SANS 164-1 (the large, three-pin plugs used in the country for decades). In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral is joined by Gianfranco Campetti, who has played an instrumental role at the SABS in helping define SANS 164-2, to discuss the implications of the standard, why it’s needed and what it means for consumers. Campetti sets the scene by providing a history of socket and plug standards in South Africa and how they have evolved over the decades, why almost every country has its own standard, and why an attempt to create one global standard after World War 2 failed. He touches on why German Schuko plugs became popular in South Africa – they’re illegal, but still widely used – and why cellphone and power tools manufacturers gave the SABS a headache by refusing to comply with local plug standards and how the bureau responded. The conversation then turns to SANS 164-2, including a look at why it is a better and safer standard than SANS 164-1. How long will it take for South Africa to embrace the new standard, do appliance manufacturers need to do more to promote it, and what will happen to SANS 164-1 plugs? We recommend you watch the video version of this podcast, though an audio version is also available.
As the cloud continues to become a standard workplace technology for companies across all sectors, internal IT departments may struggle to effectively monitor and maintain an effective cloud environment. To alleviate this, BBD has launched a new, specialised cloud management service called MServ to help companies manage their cloud setups to ensure flexibility and cost effectiveness. BBD offers three tailored packages that have additional add-ons, depending on the unique environment. In this episode of the podcast, BBD's executive head of R&D, Tony van der Linden, and company executive Richard Kantor unpacked the challenges facing companies in an increasingly cloud-dominated IT environment and what the MServ offering brings to the table. Kantor and Van der Linden take listeners through practical examples of the BBD solution in use as well as the three tailored solutions available to clients.
Ellies Holdings is a 41-year-old JSE-listed company whose products, from television aerials to electrical cables and LED lighting, are well known to most South Africans. What many people don't know is the company has been through enormous difficulty in recent years -- to the extent that its auditors raised a red flag around its 2020 annual financial results, saying there were "material concerns" about its ability to continue as a going concern. But recently appointed CEO Shaun Prithivirajh said the big pain is already behind Ellies and he, and his management team, are focused on future growth opportunities after a big clean-up of the business last year. Though the share price is still languishing at just 6c (from a peak of about R10 in 2013), Prithivirajh is convinced better days are ahead. One of the key focus areas for Ellies is a planned launch, in the next six weeks, of solutions that will take it into the home solar market. With a network of 3 500 installers who can be trained to help Ellies go to market with its solar solutions, and a South African household sector keen find to solutions to Eskom's ongoing power cuts, Prithivirajh believes this will prove to be a key pillar of the business in future. Listen to the interview to find out more about Ellies' plans in this regard as well as the work that has done to clean up the legacy problems that have bedevilled the company.
In this special edition of the TechCentral podcast, Duncan McLeod chats to three top industry experts to unpack communications regulator Icasa’s invitations to apply for broadband spectrum and for the wholesale open-access network (Woan). McLeod is joined by Steve Song, Kerron Edmunson and Mortimer Hope to discuss the ITAs in detail, including what they means for South Africa’s telecommunications industry and consumers. Song, who has many hats, including as fellow in residence at the Mozilla Foundation, Hope, who runs a policy and regulatory consultancy and who is a former director for Africa at the GSMA, and Edmunson, an attorney who specialises in telecoms policy and regulation, start by giving their high-level views of the spectrum ITA. What’s good about it, what’s not so good about it, and what needs to be fixed? The conversation then delves into greater detail, looking at the spectrum lots that Icasa has created for the auction and whether these make sense. Is Icasa trying to engineer a particular outcome? And if it is, is that a good thing or a bad thing? The three panellists then unpack the reserve prices set by Icasa. Are they too high? Too low? Just right? Is an auction the best model to use to allocate spectrum in an emerging market like South Africa? What will be the impact on retail prices? Who can afford to bid? What will it mean for competition? The discussion then turns to the digital dividend bands – 700MHz and 800MHz – still occupied by analogue television broadcasters. Should Icasa be licensing these bands at this stage? Will bidders be prepared to pay top dollar for access to bands they can’t fully utilise until at least 2022? Should South Africa give up on digital terrestrial television and free up all sub-1GHz spectrum for mobile? The panellists also tackle the obligations attached to the spectrum licences – are they fair? Do they make sense? What about the requirements around mobile virtual network operators? Does the requirement to support MVN
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to Dark Fibre Africa executive for strategy, mergers & acquisitions Vino Govender about the digital transformation project the company embarked on and the lessons learnt. Govender shares DFA's approach to digital transformation, why it made customer experience the centre of its strategy, how it scoped the project, and how it approached change management, ensuring its employees bought fully into the process. In the podcast, he explains how the company went about measuring the success of project and what, with the benefit of hindsight, DFA would do differently if it were to tackle it again from the beginning. There is plenty of food for thought here for other companies, especially those just starting down this road, so be sure not to miss the discussion!
South Africa will soon have a new "digital bank" in the form of Bettr, a fintech start-up that has been working on building a "new challenger" in the country's finance sector that promises to offer a "better alternative". In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral's Duncan McLeod interviews Bettr co-founders Tobie van Zyl (CEO) and Andrzej Stempowski (chief technology officer) to find out more about their plans, how the idea to build the bank came about, why it's specifically targeting the youth (millennials and Generation Z) and how hyperscale cloud service providers have made launching a bank in 2020 to challenge the big incumbents much easier than in the past (Bettr is using Amazon Web Services). Van Zyl and Stempowski explain what it is that Bettr will and won't offer, what consumers can expect and how the company plans to drive better financial decision making. The bank will offer not only accounts tailored for individuals, but also for small and medium enterprises as it is hoping to attract entrepreneurially minded people and then grow with them as their needs adapt. It's a fascinating discussion about a sector ripe for disruption and a company that hopes to do the disrupting. Don't miss the podcast!
In this episode of the podcast, Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Deshan Moodley and Pinnacle’s Jeremy Lichtenstein unpack the impact of the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown on mid-sized enterprises, and the small and medium business sector, and the role IT solutions can play in the recovery. While the largest enterprises are often the best protected when hard times hit, smaller companies are typically the first to feel the full brunt of a downturn. Many are struggling, while others are hanging on for dear life, and although digital transformation has taken on renewed urgency because of Covid-19, it’s not often a top-of-mind issue among midmarket companies and SMEs. Still, Moodley, who is HPE business development manager for the midmarket enterprise as well as worldwide TechPro lead in South Africa, and Lichtenstein, who is HPE solutions architect at Pinnacle, believe technology can play a significant role in helping these companies recover and eventually thrive again. In the podcast, Moodley and Lichtenstein chat about why companies should care about their IT systems at a time like this and what technology can do to get them through to other side of the pandemic stronger than before. The two then discuss in some detail the solutions that HPE offers this segment of the market, divided into four broad categories: growth with speed and efficiency; intelligent IT management; affordability and sustainability; and IT storage and predictability. They also look at two customer case studies, one in Ghana and the other in the Eastern Cape. Don’t miss the discussion!
In this episode of the podcast, Willie Ackerman, chief sales and marketing officer at JSE-listed 4Sight Holdings, talks about how the Covid-19 lockdown has dramatically accelerated digital transformation. Ackerman believes the world is already moving on from so-called "fourth Industrial Revolution" technologies to what he calls Enterprise 5.0. What is this, and why will it mean for businesses and the world of work?
He talks about the key areas he believes organisations need to get right to position themselves for success in a rapidly changing environment. And what questions should companies be asking before they rush headlong into overhauling their businesses for the future. How should boards and company executives be thinking about digital transformation, and what conversations is 4Sight having with its clients? Ackerman answers these questions and more in the podcast.
SUSE South Africa open-source specialist Johann Els joins the podcast for a discussion on why SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) makes SAP enterprise applications faster and more responsive, and how this can save companies money through reliability uptime and live patching. Els provides a brief introduction to SUSE, offers an overview of the open-source software market and the company's place in it, and its strategic partnership with SAP. He talks about how SUSE and SAP work together when dealing with clients and approaching prospective clients, why companies should consider SLES for SAP applications, including for SAP/Hana deployments and environments where high availability is essential. * This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned
Bob Skinstad on life after pro-rugby and investing in tech
In this episode of the podcast, Duncan McLeod interviews former Springbok rugby captain Bob Skinstad. Skinstad, who now lives in London, talks about the career he's been building since retiring from professional rugby and his partnership with Knife Capital and his work at Draper-Gain Investments, which has seen him dive head-first into the world of technology investment. He then shares his views on the challenges involved for pro rugby players in building a career after dedicating the first part of their working careers to the sport. Based in the UK, and talking to investors there, Skinstad has a unique view of how South Africa is seen on the global stage. He talks about the challenges and opportunities facing the country, and why he believes South African entrepreneurs are still among the best in the world. Lastly, he enthuses about a new app, being built by the founder of Evernote, called Mmhmm, and why he thinks it could be the next big thing. Don't miss the interview!
In this episode, Duncan McLeod interviews Absa Group CIO Wilhelm Krige about the mammoth project, now mostly completed, of separating the banking giant's IT systems from former parent Barclays. The total cost of the separation amounted to R17.5-billion, with Barclays paying R12.6-billion to help fund it. Much of this spend went to the IT project involved in separating the systems of the two banking giants, with a significant amount also earmarked to marketing costs associated with the rebranding to Absa. In the podcast, Krige talks about the scope of the IT separation, the complexity involved, how the group got it right with only a few hiccups along the way, and how it has positioned Absa for future innovation and growth. He covers the milestones achieved during the project and what he'd do differently with the benefit of hindsight. He also talks about the involvement of regulators in the project and why they had to be kept regularly updated on the progress. Lastly, Krige explains the impact of the Covid-19 lockdown, both on this project and on the bank more broadly. It's fascinating discussion about one of South Africa's biggest-ever IT projects with one of the country's leading CIOs. Don't miss it!
Frans Cronje, co-founder and CEO of Cape Town-based artificial intelligence firm DataProphet joins the TechCentral podcast to unpack the big fundraising round it announced last week with Knife Capital. The investment round, which also includes funding from the Industrial Development Corp and Norican Group, came to US$6-million (about R100-million) and will be used to fund global expansion in Europe and the US, TechCentral reported on 24 August. In the podcast, Cronje explains the background to DataProphet and what it was founded to achieve, including a look at both its first commercial projects and some of the more interesting work it's been involved with around the world in that time. The firm, which is firmly cemented in what is called "Industry 4.0", has ambitions to expand globally following the latest funding round - Cronje explains which parts of the US and Europe it will focus on and why, and whether he sees opportunities in the global manufacturing hubs of China and Japan (spoiler: he does). The team plans to keep its engineering and operations base in South Africa and Cronje explains in the podcast why he believes it's easier to attract the sort of talent the company needs here than in, say, the US, where top skills are hoovered up by the big technology giants. Don't miss the discussion!
Nedbank has made big strides with Nedbank Money App Lite, a smaller, less resource-intensive version of its banking app that's built as "progressive Web application". In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to Tawanda Chatikobo, Nedbank's head of digital channels, to learn more about how the Covid-19 pandemic, and the associated lockdown, has changed the way consumers use digital banking services and why Nedbank Money App Lite is a cornerstone of the company's strategy to get more people onto its digital channels. Nedbank Money App Lite was launched in November 2019, and since then the bank has continued to add functionality to it, including card-and-Pin registration, biometric sign-on (fingerprint and face ID) on supported handsets, and chat functionality allowing customers to talk to an agent directly from the app. In the podcast, Chatikobo provides more details on these new features and the other functionality available in the app. He also explains the concept of a "progressive Web app" and why Nedbank chose to go that route with Money App Lite. Don't miss the discussion!
Revix co-founder and CEO Sean Sanders joins TechCentral for a discussion on cryptocurrencies as an investment class and why current world events are underpinning the renewed boom in bitcoin and other cryptos. In the podcast, Sanders explains why he thinks cryptocurrencies - and gold - are booming in 2020 and whether this will continue for the foreseeable future. The price rises of most major cryptocurrencies mark a significant shift from the "crypto winter" that followed the January 2018 crash of bitcoin. What happens next? Revix, which is backed by JSE-listed investment holding company Sabvest, allows consumers to invest in cryptocurrency Bundles, similar to the way people use exchange-traded funds as an investment vehicle. The Bundles ensure investors always have optimal exposure to the world's top 10 crypotocurrencies. It also has a product that allows people to invest in PAX Gold, an asset-backed digital token that provides direct ownership of physical gold held in London vaults, while also benefiting from the speed and mobility of a digital asset. The conversation covers everything from decentralised finance, or DeFi, and why this is an exploding area of interest in finance circles, to the way companies like Revix are regulated. Don't miss it!
When the hard Covid-19 lockdown was introduced in South Africa on 27 March, many companies were forced to scramble to find ways to shift their workforces from their offices to employees’ homes. Some did better than others; some are still struggling to find the right balance and to support their employees during this unprecedented time. It was a shift that had a big impact on productivity – both positive and negative – and one that left many companies unsure about everything from connecting their newly remote workforce to ensuring the company’s systems were secured. In this episode of the podcast, Dimension Data’s chief go-to-market officer, Setumo Mohapi, and the company’s intelligent infrastructure executive, Kyle Stanton, discuss the company’s Smart Virtual Workplace solution that aims to make it easier to adjust to the new reality. The Smart Virtual Workplace solution is designed to meet end-user requirements and expectations – for both customers and employees. It is secure by design, monitored and delivered at scale. It offers solutions such as Smart Connectivity, Secure Smart Access, Secure Remote Productivity, Advanced Collaboration and Secure Remote Desktop Access. Mohapi begins the discussion by talking about the big changes that have taken place at Dimension Data this year, including a major restructuring designed to simply the group’s structure and make it more efficient and simpler for customers to get the support they need from the group. He then discusses the impact of the lockdown on the way companies approach IT and answers whether there has been a fundamental and permanent shift, especially when it comes to conversations around digital transformation and digital readiness? Stanton then provides an overview of the Smart Virtual Workplace solution and what it offers companies and their employees. He also talks about what the distributed workplace of the future might look like and why. And what does this mean for productivity in ... ctd ...
In this episode of the podcast, Duncan McLeod speaks to James Portman, founder and CEO of Centurion-based LightWare LiDAR, about the company's R25-million fundraising round with private equity player Sanari Capital. Portman, who is joined in the discussion by Sanari CEO Samantha Pokroy, explains how a South Africa light detection and ranging (Lidar) company has caught the eye of hi-tech clients around the world. LightWave plans to use the private-equity fundraising to expand its product offerings further abroad, Portman explains in the podcast. He talks about how the company was started, its focus areas and where he sees the business going. Pokroy then explains why Sanari Capital -- backed by institutional investor 27four -- decided to invest in LightWave LiDAR and its expectations from the investment. She explains Sanari's focus area, how the investment in LightWave came about and where the company intends to direct funds through its new, R1.5-billion "lower and mid-market fund". Don't miss the discussion!
In this promoted episode of the podcast, executive for the Huawei business unit at Pinnacle, talks about the latest version of Wi-Fi, version 6, and what it can do that previous versions could not. He delves into Huawei's AirEngine solution and what it is capable of, including supporting up to 512 users on one access point and delivering throughput of up to 10.75Gbit/s. Aimed at enterprise users, the technology is aimed at environments where there is significant demand for Internet access. The discussion then shifts to Huawei's OceanStor Dorado all-flash array solution and why it's important to business. He explains the advantages of the technology over more traditional storage arrays, including speed, reliability and power consumption. Don't miss the discussion!
Mark Rayner, CEO of MultiChoice South Africa, joins TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod on the podcast to discuss the major announcements made by the pay-television operator on Wednesday, including the launch of the DStv Explora Ultra personal video recorder (PVR). In the podcast, Rayner unpacks what the new PVR can do and its significance in MultiChoice's product portfolio. He explains why, despite the Explora Ultra's support 4K-resolution content, MultiChoice has no immediate plans to launch 4K channels. The discussion then turns to the DStv Streama, a streaming set-top box also unveiled by MultiChoice on Wednesday. He explains what the Streama will be able to do, why it's running software called the Reference Design Kit (rather than Android), and where it fits into the portfolio. Then, on DStv's new "dishless" offering, Rayner explains why this is priced the same as legacy satellite bouquets and what consumers need to know about it. There's plenty more in the interview, including a look at Covid-19's impact on the SuperSport business and why MultiChoice decided to allow competitor streaming services on its platform. Don't miss the discussion!
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral is joined by Mannie Tzingakis, technical lead for sub-Saharan Africa at Trend Micro, for a discussion on the trends in the Internet security space, especially since the advent of Covid-19. Tzingakis talks about the biggest security problems associated with the work-from-home measures introduced during the lockdown and what both end users and companies need to do to secure themselves from malicious actors. How do companies ensure their employees are more security conscious -- do they take a heavy-handed approach or is a softly-softly approach the better option? Tzingakis explains what Trend Micro, which is a leader in cloud security solutions through its Cloud One offering, is doing in the cloud space and how this differs from the traditional security solutions companies have deployed. Lastly, Trend Micro recently commissioned research, called Head in the Clouds, which identified four personas of people in organisations and their approach to security: fearful, conscientious, ignorant and daredevil. Tzingakis talks about the research findings and explains which of the personas is most dangerous to the business from a security perspective -- the answer may surprise you.
South African Internet of things specialist IoT.nxt has signed a strategic partnership agreement with Vodafone's UK subsidiary that will see the two companies collaborating in delivering IoT solutions to the mobile operator's enterprise customer base. IoT.nxt, which was recently acquired by South Africa's Vodacom Group (which is also controlled by Vodafone Group), will help Vodafone UK expand its already-strong position in IoT solutions in the enterprise market. In this episode of the podcast, IoT.nxt co-founder and CEO Nico Steyn is joined by Vodafone UK head of innovation Danny Kelly to talk about the partnership and unpack its implications. The two executives discuss how the partnership will work, which industries they intend to target first and why Vodafone chose a South African IoT company to help it expand its offerings in the space. Don't miss the discussion!
In this episode, Duncan McLeod speaks to Telkom Financial Services managing executive Sibusiso Ngwenya to unpack the news at the weekend that the telecommunications operator is launching a range of financial services products. Telkom has launched a life insurance business and, like other operators, has begun offering funeral insurance -- big business in South Africa -- to it mobile clients. It has also begun offering business loans. In the podcast, Ngwenya explains why Telkom is doing this, whether telecoms operators have the right culture to tackle a completely different industry to ICT and why the company has chosen to work through partners, including GuardRisk Life, part of Momentum Metropolitan Holdings. The conversation then turns to Telkom's plan to launch a digital wallet to allow customers to transact electronically on its Yep app (which emerged from its Yellow Pages business) and other transactional platforms online. Lastly, Ngwenya talks about how big he sees Telkom Financial Services becoming and whether the company plans to develop a full-fledged mobile money offering similar to Vodacom Group's M-Pesa and MTN Group's Mobile Money offerings. Don't miss the discussion!
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod interviews Darren Bedford, chief development officer at Wiocc, a telecommunications infrastructure company originally founded to invest in the Eassy cable system along Africa's east coast. Bedford unpacks who Wiocc's shareholders are, why the company was founded to invest in Eassy, and the investments it has made since into other marine cable systems. He also talks about Wiocc's infrastructure investments in South Africa and where the company is seeing the most demand. The discussion then turns to the new submarine cable systems coming to Africa, including Google's Equiano and the Facebook-backed 2Africa, and whether there is sufficient demand on the continent for the huge amounts of capacity these systems will bring. Don't miss the discussion!
Skills in the IT industry are in short supply and have been for decades. But the skills shortage in the Internet of things (IoT) arena is even more acute. In the fourth and final in a series of interviews with IoT.nxt, TechCentral is joined by the company's chief digital officer, Francois Volschenk, and its head of business development and operations, Terje Moen, to discuss the challenge. In the podcast, Volschenk and Moen talk about: * How the skills shortage is affecting IoT.nxt; * What the company is doing to address the problem, including the creation of an academy to drive skills development around IoT; * How the academy will work in practice; * The company's relationship with the University of the Free State and the Belgium Campus ITversity in Pretoria; and * The work that IoT.nxt is doing in ensuring upliftment of people through skills development programmes. Don't miss the discussion!
Fred Saayman, head of the Huawei business unit at Pinnacle, returns to the podcast for a discussion on the impact of US sanctions on the Chinese ICT giant's business, especially in the South African context. In the podcast, Saayman explains that Huawei has made good progress dealing with the challenges that have been thrown at it in the past year, including developing its own chipsets and other technologies across its wide range of products to lessen its reliance on other suppliers. "I would never have believed an organisation could actually change and transform, research, develop and innovate in such a short period of time - it's impressive," he said. "With the speed and agility of its supply chain, Huawei has been able to address all of its customer orders. They remain bullish on 5G base stations. They have made plans and they are now a lot more self-sufficient." Saayman talks about what the South African business community thinks about Huawei and the US sanctions. "They are still optimistic... South African customers, whether it's the financial industry or mining or the public sector, they are still very favourable towards Huawei." Don't miss the discussion!
In this promoted episode of the podcast, TechCentral is joined by Dell Technologies South Africa director of data centre compute Tony Bartlett for a discussion on some of the major trends affecting the IT industry. Specifically, Bartlett talks about the rise of edge computing and what's driving it, and explains when an edge solution makes sense versus a centralised approach through, for example, a hyperscale data centre. The need to derive insights from the explosion of the volume of data is increasingly being driven at the edge, he says. In the podcast, Bartlett explains the implications of this shift. He also touches on some of the enabling technologies of edge computing, including 5G, software-defined wide-area networking, artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. Don't miss the discussion!
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral is joined by Dell Technologies South Africa client solutions director Chris Buchanan for a discussion on how Covid-19 has brought about dramatic changes in the workforce. The pandemic has been called a Black Swan event, something that only comes around once in a generation. It has certainly impacted the way people work significantly and probably made digital transformation a top priority for many companies, even those that were previously sitting on the sidelines. Will Covid-19 change the way we do things fundamentally and forever, or once the pandemic is over will we go back to business as usual? Buchanan gives his take on these issues and also expands on the impact that the lockdown has had on demand for computers and other technology products, and what the outlook is as companies increasingly look to equip their employees for remote work. The workforce, he says, was changing anyway, before the pandemic hit, especially as millennials, who have a different outlook to previous generations, begin to enter the world of work. Lastly, the conversation turns to the subject of electronic waste and the work that Dell is doing to reduce its impact on the planet. Don't miss the discussion!
Seacom chief information officer and head of Seacom Cloud Marius Burger joins the TechCentral podcast for a discussion on cloud computing and the company's approach to market. Burger discusses how cloud computing's role has changed (or, rather, how people's perceptions of its role have changed) as a result of the Covid-19 lockdowns and work-from-home measures. He also explains Seacom's approach to cloud, and why the company is targeting the mid-market, where it sees a big opportunity. What do companies need to consider before moving their systems and processes into a cloud environment? Can it be done on a piecemeal basis and does it need a proper strategy behind it? And just how safe is it? Burger covers all of these topics in the podcast, and more.
In the third of a series of podcasts with IoT.nxt, the company's CEO, Nico Steyn, and chief of product engineering, André Jacobs, join TechCentral for a discussion on innovation. Innovation is probably something we don’t see enough of in South Africa’s IT industry, with many of the large players in the sector historically building their businesses on the back of reselling and supporting international technology products. There have, of course, been exceptions to that rule, and IoT.nxt fits into that category. In fact, the company was created on the back of an idea to solve a business challenge. In the podcast, Steyn explains why he sees innovation as important to IoT.nxt’s growth over the years and its success as a business. He expands on some of the innovations IoT.nxt has been involved with. In 2016, the company was identified by Gartner as one of the six "Aspiring Innovators" at the Gartner Symposium/ITXpo held in Cape Town. It was also a finalist for innovation for Emerging Enterprises at the 2016 Technology Top 100 Awards and the winner of the category "Management of Technology for Medium Enterprises" at TT100 in 2019. Steyn and Jacobs expand on what that recognition contributed to the company and its innovation focus? Don't miss the discussion.
TechCentral is joined in this episode of the podcast by Doug Woolley, MD of Dell Technologies South Africa, for a discussion on the company post Dell's blockbuster acquisition in 2016 of EMC for US$67-billion and how that deal has changed the organisation. In the first of a series of three podcasts with Dell Technologies executives, Woolley explains the rationale behind the acquisition of EMC (and with it, VMware) and the impact it's had on Dell locally. He explains the importance of VMware to Dell and why it continues to be run as a separate business. He then expands on where Dell Technologies is positioned in the local market, as an end-to-end technology provider, as well as the company's growth plans in the coming years. Don't miss the discussion!
Anton Potgieter, founder of TelePassport and a former CEO of Huge Group, has a new venture in the telecommunications space. Called Trabel, the Cape Town-based company has developed Scotty BusinessLine, an app and service he said will "reinvent business calls on cellphones". Scotty BusinessLine provides “a second or business telephone line on your mobile phone”, Potgieter said. "Historically, making business calls from a cellphone has had several inherent failings: the telephone number shown is not a company number, which can look unprofessional, the call is not automatically charged to the company account and requires reimbursement (via tax inefficient “cell allowances”, or admin-intensive manual claim forms), and possibly the most important, the company gets no record of the business numbers that are being called on its behalf," he explained. Scotty is an Android app - iOS is coming soon - that gives users their own Scotty telephone number (in the 087 range) from which they can make or receive calls at a flat rate of 79c/minute. The app replaces users' default Android phone dialler and allows them to make calls through either their Sim card, or through their Scotty number, using a choice of two separate dial-out buttons. Calls made from the “Scotty” button are made from the Scotty phone number and they use neither the phone's Sim card airtime or data - instead, these are billed to the Scotty account. The technology Trabel is using is known as "seamless callback". In the podcast, Potgieter explains why he started Trabel and launched Scotty BusinessLine, and why he believes there is huge demand for such a solution in South Africa.
MTN South Africa chief technology and information officer Giovanni Chiarelli joins the TechCentral podcast to chat about the company's launch on Tuesday of its commercial 5G network and what was involved. In the podcast, Chiarelli talks about why MTN has chosen the cities and towns it has for the launch, why it's using different frequency bands - including 700MHz in Port Alfred - and why it won't be rushing to build a national 5G network until there's clarity on the outcome of a planned spectrum auction. Chiarelli also explains why MTN is deploying a technology known as dynamic spectrum sharing and why he believes this year's Apple iPhone 12 launch is going to propel consumer interest in 5G.
In this promoted episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to Revix co-founder and CEO Sean Sanders about cryptocurrencies as an investment class. Revix, which offers access to bitcoin and other crypto assets through crypto Bundles, is backed by JSE-listed investment holding company Sabvest. In the podcast, Sanders - who has worked in finance and venture capital and who is an expert in exchange-traded funds - explains where Revix is positioned in the market and its various offerings. Specifically, Revix has brought the methodology of diversified index funds into the crypto world. These funds have shown they can, on average, outperform actively managed funds, according to Sanders. He explains how Revix rebalances its crypto Bundles monthly to ensure investors get optimal exposure to the top 10 cryptocurrencies. Sanders then talks about PAX Gold, an asset-backed digital token that provides direct ownership of physical gold held in London vaults, while also benefiting from the speed and mobility of a digital asset. The discussion turns to nation states' money printing amid the Covid-19 pandemic and what that means for investors and where Sanders sees Revix going in the coming years. Don't miss the discussion!
In this promoted episode of the podcast, TechCentral is joined by IoT.nxt CEO Nico Steyn and Vodacom Business CEO William Mzimba to talk about Vodacom's acquisition of the company and the work it is doing for the telecommunications operator and its parent, Vodafone Group. In the podcast, Mzimba unpacks what attracted Vodacom to IoT.nxt and highlights some of the projects the companies are now involved in, including one to reduce power consumption at the operator's thousands of network high sites. Mzimba also talks about how Vodacom is changing strategically as a company and how that change, underpinned by digital transformation, will accelerate in the coming years. IoT.nxt will help it in that journey. Steyn then expands on some of the specific challenges that IoT.nxt is helping Vodacom address and looks at how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected conversations around digital transformation. Later in the podcast, IoT.nxt chief commercial officer Andre Strauss joins the conversation and helps explore the impact of IoT on business. Don't miss the discussion!
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to Dom Oettl, MD of The Training Room Online (TTRO), on how the company has used cloud computing -- and specifically Amazon Web Services -- to underpin its business success. TTRO designs and develops learning solutions using immersive technologies and learning methodologies. The company needed the enterprise benefits of scale without the complexity of traditional hosting, Oettl explains in the podcast. Specifically, it needed compute and storage on demand; redundancy and resilient architecture; intelligent load balancing; compliance and governance; and adherence to robust security standards. Since the TTRO team didn't have the time or the expertise on AWS, it needed to lean on a local partner. It found that partner in iOCO, part of the EOH Holdings stable. iOCO group executive for cloud Richard Vester explains in the podcast how it assisted TTRO and the role of companies like iOCO in helping businesses prepare for and manage their cloud journeys.
Crime has accelerated dramatically since the end of level 4 of the national lockdown and is now easily as bad as it was before South Africa entered the lockdown in late March. That's according to Ricky Croock, CEO of Vumacam, the company building a CCTV network across Johannesburg, who was speaking on the TechCentral podcast on Tuesday. Croock discusses the impact of the lockdown on crime levels - they fell so much that not a single incident occurred across Vumacam's footprint for a period of weeks when South Africa first entered lockdown. Unfortunately, the situation has quickly reversed. However, Croock said there are important lessons to be learnt from the lockdown to try to tackle the scourge of crime in future. He provides an update on the Vumacam roll-out and which other cities it's looking to expand to as well as how the company seeks to address the privacy concerns related to the deployment of its network. Don't miss the conversation!
In this promoted episode of the podcast, TechCentral speaks to Eaton product manager for Africa Jaco du Plooy about the role UPS solutions can play in load shedding and in saving lives during the Covid-19 pandemic. Du Plooy takes viewers and listeners through the range of UPS solutions that Eaton offers, from options for powering individuals' homes, all the way up to industrial-scale solutions for data centres. With many people still working from home - and work-from-home rules likely to persist for some time to come - Du Plooy talks about the challenges and options available for ensuring people can continue to be productive once Eskom load shedding inevitably returns. He also explains why total cost of ownership when buying UPS equipment is important and why buyers should avoid simply looking at the sticker price. Lastly, Du Plooy talks about Eaton's go-to-market strategy through Pinnacle's Datanet division. Don't miss the discussion!
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod is joined by Alen Ribic, co-founder - with his wife, Aisha Pandor - of SweepSouth, the on-demand home cleaning company that last year raised R30-million in a funding round from Naspers. Ribic talks about the challenges of starting and running a business with a spouse, how SweepSouth coped with the lockdown, which prevented its on-demand cleaners from working, and the fund that was created to support cleaners during this time. The fund has already raised more than R9-million and backers include Dell founder Michael Dell and his wife Susan. The conversation then turns to what SweepSouth has done since the Naspers investment, including expansion into Kenya and the recent launch of SweepSouth Connect, a new marketplace that connects vetted professionals to people needing those services in their local area. It's a great discussion with the co-founder of one of South Africa's most successful start-ups - don't miss it!
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral is joined by Peter Margaris and Simone Santana of Skybox Security for a discussion on why information security must remain a top priority through the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. Santana, who is business development director for Skybox Security in South Africa, discusses the company’s presence in the local market, how long it’s been operating for here and which industries it is particularly focused on. Margaris, who is head of product marketing based in California, expands on the sort of conversations he’s been having with chief information security officers in recent months, especially since Covid-19 became a global issue, and what their key concerns are from a security perspective. While many companies have realised that their employees can work from home and be productive, it has placed enormous strain on corporate IT departments, and especially those employees responsible for ensuring the integrity and safety of IT systems and company data. Do work-from-home measures require a complete rethink of the way the corporate network is engineered? Is it as simple as using a VPN, or are some companies going to have to reengineer the way they approach IT and IT security? Margaris tackles these questions in the podcast. What are some of the other technologies that are being employed during this time to secure company data and the network? Are customers experiencing specific challenges managing an expanded hybrid network environment? And although Covid-19 has arguably done more than anything else to accelerate digital transformation initiatives, is that a good thing if companies are suddenly trying to rush into it? Related to this, with digital transformation accelerating, are customers concerned about being able to adequately analyse their attack surface and overall potential risk exposure? If you’re in the information security business, don’t miss this discussion.
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral is joined by iOCO managing executive for data and analytics Varsha Ramesar and iOCO executive head of cloud Richard Vester for a further discussion on hyperscale computing. Specifically, Ramesar and Vester delve into three key areas in the hyperscale computing and cloud discussion, namely analytics and big data; skills; and moving data to actionable intelligence. Ramesar kicks off the conversation with a look at her role at iOCO and the sort of conversations she is having with enterprises in South Africa. She then discusses the differences of running analytics and big data processes in the hyperscale computing world compared to what companies have been doing on premises until now. Are South African companies taking full advantage of the power of hyperscale cloud technologies? And what does hyperscale allow companies to do with analytics and big data? Companies are sitting on more data today than ever, but the difficulty is translating that into actionable intelligence. What are some of the things companies should be considering when having these conversations? Ramesar and Vester delve into this in some detail. They also discuss the skill sets required by organisations. Do companies need to re-skill their employees as they move to hyperscale cloud services? And if so, what is involved and how should companies be approaching this? How do they ensure they’re using the right data and putting the right rules against that data to ensure they are getting the information they need to make business decisions in real time? Don’t miss the discussion!
Mike Sharman, founder of digital marketing agency Retroviral, joins TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod for a chat about MatchKit.io, a new website builder aimed at sports professionals. Founded by Sharman, Springbok rugby player Bryan Habana, and sports content creator and broadcaster Ben Karpinski, Retroactive - which owns MatchKit.co - intends to help professional sportsmen and sportswomen worldwide develop a digital presence for themselves. In the podcast, Sharman explains that while most sports people have a presence on social media, they often don't have their own website. The idea behind the website is to make it easier for sports professionals to develop an online presence, raise money for their chosen charities and make money from selling merchandise. In the podcast, Sharman explains how the business model works, how he and Habana came up with the idea for the platform, and where they see it going next. Sharman also looks back at 10 years of Retroviral and some of the big campaigns the agency has worked on in that time, including with Nando's and RocoMamas. Don't miss the discussion!
In this episode of the podcast, TechCentral's Duncan McLeod speaks to Tamir Shklaz, the founder of Insupply, an online marketplace built to help connect buyers and sellers of personal protective equipment (PPE) during the Covid-19 crisis. Insupply has drawn investment from two well-known South African technology entrepreneurs, Justin Drennan and Yossi Hasson, and hopes to make it easier to match suppliers of PPE with buyers. In the podcast, Shklaz explains how the platform works and what his plans are for it beyond the Covid-19.
Dark Fibre Africa executive for strategy, mergers & acquisitions Vino Govender joins the TechCentral podcast for a discussion on how Covid-19 and the lockdown in South Africa have affected both DFA and the telecommunications industry more broadly. In the podcast, Govender talks about how DFA prepared for the lockdown, what happened during the first five weeks when tight restrictions were in place, and what is likely to happen next as lockdown measures are eased. How have the lockdown and work-from-home measures affected productivity, and what will the world of work look like when we eventually emerge from this crisis? Will it be forever changed and, if so, how so? Lastly, what has the impact been on the telecoms sector - and what is likely to come next?
Promoted | Nico Steyn, co-founder and CEO of IoT.nxt, joins TechCentral for a discussion on how the company has grown a year on from Vodacom Group’s blockbuster acquisition of a 51% stake in the business. In the podcast, Steyn talks about how the company is working with Vodacom – and the broader Vodafone Group – to expand its offerings in South Africa and around the world. IoT.nxt, which offers a “technology agnostic” solution that acts as a conduit between sensors and other Internet of things devices at the edge of the network and the application layer in companies’ IT departments, has grown rapidly since its founding five years ago. Initially funded by private equity group Talent10, Steyn explains how the Vodacom acquisition came about and what it has meant for IoT.nxt. Also in the podcast, Steyn explains why Covid-19 is likely to prove beneficial for the company in the long term as the world looks to automate, and he talks about the work that IoT.nxt is doing to develop skills in the IoT space. Don’t miss the discussion.
Promoted | Continuing the discussion of last week with iOCO executive head of cloud Richard Vester, TechCentral is joined by Amazon Web Services principal developer advocate Sébastien Stormacq to explore the brave new world of hyperscale computing. In this episode, Stormacq is joined by Vester to discuss the impact of AWS opening a data centre region in South Africa and why local enterprises and other cloud users are increasingly looking to make use of local hyperscalers. Stormacq explains the advantages that the Cape Town AWS region brings to local enterprises, including lower latency, data sovereignty and advanced services, and why these are important. The discussion then turns to Amazon.com's long history in South Africa - the company's Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, on which AWS was partly built, was largely developed in Cape Town. Stormacq talks about the work that the South African team continues to do in developing technologies for AWS. Other topics in the discussion include: * What South African companies and developers are able to do with the local data centre region; * Why it's good for automation and DevOps; * The role of managed service providers like iOCO in working with enterprise customers looking to explore cloud opportunities. Vester then talks about the impact on iOCO of the opening of the new AWS region; why the company has invested so heavily in AWS solutions rather than other hyperscalers; and why enterprises should work through a managed service provider rather than going direct. Don't miss the discussion!
Norman Moyo, CEO of Econet Group-owned Distributed Power Africa (DPA), believes Africa can solve its power supply woes by unleashing the private sector in the same way as has happened in telecommunications. In this episode of the podcast, Moyo explains why he thinks the telecoms model, where the private sector stepped up and provided services where lumbering, state-owned fixed-line monopolies could not, can be applied to solve Africa's -- and South Africa's -- power challenges. The good news, Moyo says in the podcast, is that regulators in many markets across the continent get it and have started implementing progressive rules to accelerate private investment in electricity-generating infrastructure, especially in renewable energy like solar. In the interview, Moyo talks about the trends in the solar PV and battery industries, and why the price of solar installations have plummeted in the past five years and what this means for Africa. It's a great discussion. Don't miss it!
Enterprise cloud computing specialist Nutanix this week launched its desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offering in the South African market - an opportune time given the Covid-19 pandemic and the work-from-home measures currently in place. To discuss the launch of Xi Frame and what it means for local enterprises, TechCentral is joined in this promoted episode of the podcast by Paul Ruinaard, regional sales director, Craigh Stuart, chief technology officer, and Andrew Senior, cloud architect, all at Nutanix in sub-Saharan Africa. The conversation starts with Ruinaard defining the DaaS market and how it's evolved. Stuart then discusses the history of Xi Frame up to its acquisition in 2018 by Nutanix. The announcement means that South African customers will now be able to deliver virtual apps and desktops to clients no matter where they are, provisioned via the public cloud or hosted within their Nutanix-powered data centre. “It is going to be very hard for businesses to put the work-from-home genie back in the bottle, which has created the requirement for virtual workspaces that can safely and seamlessly integrate with companies' data, applications and storage environments,” said Ruinaard about the South African launch of the technology solution. “Xi Frame is a proven technology that has enjoyed extensive success globally. Now, with the local launch, we are providing South African businesses with a multi-cloud DaaS offering that will deliver the flexibility needed to better manage and deploy remote desktops, helping customers build better business resiliency for their organisations, today and beyond the current pandemic.” Xi Frame is available for on-premises use or through the local Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services data centres. Listen to the podcast discussion to learn more about how Xi Frame works in practice, its security and authentication model, and why DaaS technology is set to gain much greater traction in the future - and not only because of Covid-19.