Why moving on is hard for MTN’s Nhleko
“It’s difficult to let go.” Phuthuma Nhleko, MTN’s group president and CEO, sounds almost rueful when I ask him why he’s decided to hang up his hat at the mobile operator. “You do a lot of soul searching,” he tells me in an interview at the Melrose Arch Hotel in Johannesburg, a day after presenting [...]
Bharti founder hopes to strike it third time lucky
Indian telecommunications tycoon Sunil Bharti Mittal is hoping to make it third time lucky as he seeks to gain a presence in Africa, one of the world’s least developed mobile phone markets. After two failed attempts to tie up with South African flagship MTN, the founder-chairman of cellular giant Bharti Airtel announced this week a [...]
Software maverick Jan Baan back for another go
Briefly, about 12 years ago, Jan Baan was a billionaire, at least on paper. He’d built his company, Baan Co, into one of the biggest business software suppliers in the world and, in the mid-1990s, had taken the company public on the Nasdaq stock exchange. By 1998, amid the hype around technology stocks, Baan Co [...]
Parliament’s Vadi vows to get tough in 2010
In 2007, when the ANC asked Ismail Vadi to become chairman of the important parliamentary portfolio committee on communications, he was stunned. “I knew absolutely nothing about communications,” he says. But since assuming the role just over two years ago, Vadi has taken to the job like a duck to water. Under his direction, the [...]
‘I like to compete, which is why I took this job’
When I meet Microsoft SA MD Mteto Nyati, it isn’t long before the conversation turns to Windows Vista. Except, I don’t steer it there, Nyati does. He volunteers that Microsoft has “learnt a lot” from the “disaster” (his description) that was Vista. Reviewers and commentators met Windows Vista, the company’s much-maligned operating system released in [...]
Goldstuck, Internet legend, chases down his first novel
When I sit down for lunch with well-known technology researcher and author Arthur Goldstuck at Metzuyan on the Square in Rosebank, Johannesburg, the first thing he does is hand me a copy of his most recent book about urban legends, The Ghost that Closed Down the Town. It’s an expertly researched volume about supposed ghostly [...]
With one eye to history, Wilcocks takes the reins at IS
He may work in a futuristic, hi-tech industry, but Derek Wilcocks admits he is fascinated by the past. The newly appointed MD of Dimension Data division Internet Solutions (IS) has a keen interest in world and African history. Wilcocks, who has just taken the reins at IS from Angus MacRobert, says the transition from the [...]
Broadlink’s Brown has big plans for alternative operator
Mike Brown, MD of wireless telecommunications operator Broadlink, has come a long way from his place of birth in Chingola in Zambia’s copper belt. Brown, 44, who spent the early part of his career at electronics group Nashua, is hoping to build Broadlink, a subsidiary of WBS Holdings in which he holds a minority stake, into a significant alternative infrastructure operator in the business market in SA
A distinguished engineer who loves World of Warcraft
When IBM SA chief technology officer Clifford Foster handed in his final-year computer science assignment at the University of Pretoria, his lecturer had no way of judging whether or not it was a well-written program. That’s because the progam, a football game for the Commodore Amiga, was written in Assembler, a complex, so-called “low-level” programming [...]
Why SA’s Mr Apple prefers fine wine to bloggers
Rutger-Jan van Spaandonk says if his parents had known he’d eventually make a home for himself outside of The Netherlands, his country of birth, they’d have given him a name that’s easier for foreigners to pronounce. The executive director of Core Group, who is known by most people simply as “RJ”, emigrated to SA almost [...]
David Sinclair: 
Navin Moodley: 
Doczc: 
Graham: 
Chanyane: