Category: News

This National Women’s Month, we’re shining a light on the fabulous females in tech who are disrupting the industry and driving innovation forward, despite still being a minority.  

History proves that the first computers weren’t machines and the first programmers weren’t men. But despite the advancements the Ada Lovelaces and Annie Easleys of the world made decades ago, gender diversity in the technology industry is still a challenge.

According to a recent study, only 23%* of tech jobs are held by women in South Africa. However, that’s not to say there aren’t a handful of note-worthy females holding the torch high for those who want to follow in their footsteps.

Here, we round them up:

 

Barbara Mallison

Co-founder, Obami

“Instead of being intimidated by the dominance of men in the tech sector, women should see it as an ideal opportunity to bring a unique set of strengths and skills to the market”

Mallinson has been hailed as one of the founders of the local social e-learning platform used by schools and organisations in Africa, Europe and America. Founded in 2007, Obami is shaping the future generations by connecting them to teachers, learners, NGOs and government – all while enabling them share educational resources and assess them based on their performance.

 

Judith Owigar

“Innovation is simply finding better ways to do things. Don’t stress about tech, use what you have to improve lives – that is real innovation”

Co-founder, JuaKali and Akirachix

The Kenyan native is one of the most popular female tech leaders in Africa and is using the industry as a catalyst to ignite social change in the country. By educating the youth through technology, she believes she can increase the quality of life in Kenya and therefore change the world. It’s this that drove her to create JuaKali –  an online and mobile directory for Kenya’s skilled blue-collar workers – as well as Akirachix, a company that nurtures generations of women who use technology to develop innovations and solutions for Africa.

 

Sheryl Sandberg

COO, Facebook

“I want every little girl who’s told she’s bossy, to be told instead she has leadership skills”

If you Google her name, she comes up as one of the most powerful women in the world. Snapping her up from a position at Google in 2007, Mark Zuckerberg appointed Sandberg as his COO off the bat. Her book about grief and the loss of her husband, Option B, topped the bestseller list and inspired the masses – as did Lean In that’s aimed at women in the workplace. Sandberg is also behind Facebook’s war on Fake News, pushing hard to head off increased regulations on social media companies.

 

Annette Muller

Founder, DotNxt

“If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room!”

Driven by her passion of building and leading innovative and sustainable businesses, Muller is at the forefront of the South African tech sphere. She owns DotNxt – a Cape Ton-based company that creates, develops and delivers software, mobile, social and other digital development projects for local companies. Muller is also a coveted speaker and digital change agent, where she aims to inspire people and companies all around the world to bring a different type of edge to their business.

 

Anne Amuzu

Co-founder, Nandimobile

“Take time to talk to young people in school and in other programs so the students can understand what entrepreneurship is and begin to consider it as a career path”

Incepted by Amuzu in 2010, Nandimobile, develops software that helps companies deliver customer support and information services through SMS. As a graduate of Ghana’s Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, Amuzu is a firm believer in uplifting tech entrepreneurs in Africa by being a role model and educating scholars on how it’s done.

*Source: Women in Tech ZA

Vox has extended its partnership with Veeam, the leader in intelligent data management for hyper-available enterprises to deliver a fully managed backup offering for customers in the mid to large corporate segment.

Storage and backup is a crucial necessity and very also very much a matter of security. If you don’t know where your data is, and you don’t have a backup strategy, you lose control of your data quickly. So the question becomes how to create a data storage strategy that is robust, protected, has a good backup and disaster recovery plan.

“Some customers cannot, or simply do not want to manage their own environments and this extends to backups and ensuring secure data storage,” says Craig Freer, executive head: Cloud and Managed Services at Vox.

Veeam Backup and Replication provides the ability to backup all workloads, ensuring that these are always recoverable in the event of outages, attack, loss or theft. Coupled with Vox managed services, customers will have the peace of mind that comes from knowing their data is secure, managed and backed up.

Concludes Freer, “Businesses can no longer rely on a single backup solution when it comes to ensuring that both their systems data are secure. Building in redundancy and managing the environment are as critical as back-ups.”

Vox is looking to extend its virtual data centre offering by making it available to its channel partners.

“We believe there is a good revenue opportunity, especially for managed services providers, that cannot afford to purchase the full cloud infrastructure,” says Craig Freer, executive head of Cloud and Managed Services at Vox.

Since the launch of its Virtual Data Centre offering in 2017, Vox has seen a significant uptake by customers, and believes that by extending availability to its channel, that more companies can leverage the power of the cloud to transform their business.

Adds Freer, “We do still have customers that work directly with us and this is unlikely to change, but we are keen to grow out channel and extend our solutions footprint. Finding ways to empower our channel to sell solutions and services like our Virtual Data Centre (VDC), means we can grow a thriving and profitable ICT eco-system that is based on value and value-for-money.”

Channel partners that are interested in offering VDC to their customers can contact Vox to find out how to benefit from this offering.

In the weeks leading up to the launch of the Vox Internet of Things (Vox IoT) in April 2018, CEO Jacques du Toit and Senior Product Manager Deon Oosthuysen showcased our latest offering – Vox Agri-Tech – at the recent Wildlife Ranching South Africa (WRSA) Conference, and Agricultural Seil-Safari (Sail-Safari) respectively. Continue reading “Vox Takes Agri-Tech to the Land and Seas”

Vox has collaborated with cloud services brokerage First for Cloud and global software company, Veeam to bring to market a best of breed cloud-based backup solution to help local business better protect their information.

As companies digitise more of their operations, the data collected and stored becomes increasingly valuable to running and growing their business. Apart from having to mitigate for hardware or software caused issues, the rapid growth of cybercrime makes it critical for businesses to backup their data.

“This is usually done with the backup information being stored on a server that sites within the same data centre or premises. However, if you look at best practice, you need to have multiple copies of a backup, including one that is stored off site to ensure a higher level of protection against data loss,” says Craig Freer, Vox Executive Head for Cloud and Managed Services.

“Vox Cloud Backup for Veeam enables customers who have Veeam as their onsite backup software solution to connect and automatically store their backups securely to the Vox cloud platform, helping them de-risk their business in this area.”

The product leverages Veeam’s modern backup technology, including forever incremental backups, GFS (Grandfather-Father-Son) retention policies and more. A console gives customers the ability to recover data for restores, track their consumption, and receive reminders for hosted storage renewals.

“This product brings together three leading companies, each with its own strengths; Vox provides a local cloud storage platform offering the highest levels of security and reliability, First for Cloud has a broad customer and distribution base, and Veeam brings best-of-breed backup software,” says Freer.

Every modern company has growing volumes of valuable data; as such, Vox Cloud Backup for Veeam is targeted at businesses ranging all the way from large corporations down to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) that are already running Veeam on-premise.

According to Freer, the product is unique in that it is available for purchase online, and is easy for system administrators to install and configure. Primary support for the product will be provided by Veeam, with issues being escalated to Vox should there be the requirement to do so.

“We’re seeing tremendous growth in the backup space, especially in light growing incidents of malware and ransomware; the reality is if you have an attack on your server and you don’t have a backup, that information is lost. Using a cloud-based backup facility gives them an added layer of redundancy” adds Freer.