Interview: Grant Morgan of Cybernest

IT News Africa attended the IT Leaders Africa 2011 Summit in Sandton this week, and we caught up with Grant Morgan, the Managing Executive: Sales and Marketing for Cybernest. As a division of Telkom which specialises in outsourced IT infrastructure and services, Cybernest is actively promoting the migration of business IT to the Cloud.

We asked Grant to share some insight on Cybernest’s plans for the near future.

How is Cybernest positioning itself in Africa?

Cloud is our business. It’s something we do every day. Every solution we sell to every customer is a cloud solution. At the moment we are a South Africa only operation, the only work we’ve done in Africa is around potential disaster recovery and compliance. We are going to get things right in South Africa and then expand.

What is Cybernest’s strategy for South Africa for the next year?

We have a significant base of customers that have Virtual Private Networks (VPN) from Telkom, they are used to dealing with Telkom Business. The most natural strategy is to look at the cloud offerings for the networks we’ve already got, and up-sell our customers to the cloud offerings we have available.

How will the growth in mobile Internet access impact Cybernest?

The international competition can’t be underestimated in this market. And they are not necessarily going to set up shop here, for example, large companies are providing cloud services out of the US. The internet knows no boundaries. We will be different because we offer a private, customised, secure network environment. We are targeted at larger businesses, not like the free online offerings. We provide flexible solutions with a face-to-face personalisation. The closer partnership will set us apart.

Do you have any specific investment planned for SA for the next year?

We are planning on making significant investments in terms of products offered, moving along the lines of dynamic cloud based services.  Also, geographical expansion, we will be rolling out network coverage in Durban and other areas which we don’t currently provide coverage. We also want to invest in people, to provide a highly skilled consultant who can build the best Network for our customers.

By Angela Meadon