Dimension Data’s long-serving Africa and Middle East CEO Allan Cawood is stepping down at the end of May. This has triggered a management shake-up at the technology services group, with Internet Solutions (IS) MD Derek Wilcocks taking over the position from Cawood.

At the same time, Saki Missaikos, who has been regional sales director at Didata for the past eight years, is taking the reins from Wilcocks at IS.

Cawood intends to remain in the IT industry, focused on investments in the private-equity industry rather than being involved in a day-to-day operational role. But he will first take a yearlong sabbatical.

“There is a lot of change happening in the industry, and Allan feels it’s time to step aside and let someone else lead the group into that new era,” says Wilcocks. “He is leaving on a very friendly basis.”

Cawood first became involved with Didata in 1993 when it bought a 35% stake in his company, Digital Networking Systems. Didata acquired the balance of the shares in 1998 and merged the company with Dimension Data Networking and Cawood was named as the unit’s MD. He later went on to assume the role of Didata SA before taking on the broader Middle East and Africa region.

Wilcocks, who is also joining the Didata group executive team, says that historically Didata has managed its Middle East and Africa IT services business, IS and subsidiary Plessey as “very separate” businesses and that under his leadership he wants them to cooperate much more closely to take advantage of the convergence happening between traditional IT and telecommunications.

“A lot of our big clients are saying they don’t want a separate telecoms contract from their outsourcing contract,” he says. “With the technology trends happening in the market now, like cloud computing, that is going to accelerate.”

This is also true as mobile devices such tablet computers and smartphones increasingly become enterprise tools that companies want to take advantage of by integrating them more tightly into their business processes.

But Wilcocks emphasises that there are no plans to merge IS and Plessey into the Didata brand and they will continue to function as separate entities with their own leaders and management teams. “The question is how we maximise the assets we have to deliver on client requirements in this new world.”

He adds that there are also no plans to integrate IS into the telecommunications business of Didata group parent Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) Corp of Japan.

“That conversation is not happening,” he says. “NTT had no presence in Africa [before its R24,4bn acquisition of Didata in 2010] so Didata is it and they’ve asked us to keep all the asset under this umbrella. There is no discussion about merging IS into NTT Communications, but at a technical level, IS is already interconnecting with NTT.”