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The TechCentral podcast, hosted by Duncan McLeod, brings you interesting interviews with South African technology industry leaders and other interesting people
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Episodes
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24 AUG 2021 · 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!
16 AUG 2021 · 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.
13 AUG 2021 · 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
25 MAY 2021 · 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!
4 MAR 2021 · 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!
25 FEB 2021 · 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!
22 FEB 2021 · 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!
19 FEB 2021 · 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.
18 FEB 2021 · 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.
17 FEB 2021 · 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!
The TechCentral podcast, hosted by Duncan McLeod, brings you interesting interviews with South African technology industry leaders and other interesting people
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| Author | TechCentral |
| Organization | TechCentral |
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