Cisco hands Africa business to partner veteran Ossama Eldeeb — Ossama Eldeeb

Cisco has appointed Ossama Eldeeb as MD for Africa, effective immediately, handing the networking and security company’s continental operations to a 26-year industry veteran who has spent recent years building out its partner channel.

Eldeeb will run Cisco’s commercial operations and investment strategy across Africa, working with the company’s local partners, Cisco said in a statement this week.

He takes the role over from Shane Heraty, who ran Cisco Africa until he was promoted on 1 May to vice president for Cisco’s Middle East, Africa, Türkiye, Romania and CIS region, succeeding David Meads, who retired after three decades at the company.

Eldeeb moves up from regional director of Cisco’s partner organisation in that same region, where he oversaw routes to market, managed services expansion and the shift to the Cisco 360 partner programme.

Before joining Cisco, Eldeeb held senior partner, commercial and sales roles at VMware, AMD and Microsoft. He holds a master’s degree in mass communications, with a minor in computer science, from the American University in Cairo.

Cisco said it has run 55 projects across Africa under its Country Digital Acceleration programme, which pairs the company with governments on digitalisation and secure infrastructure. It said its Networking Academy has reached 3.3 million learners in 56 African countries, backed by more than US$390-million in curriculum and resources.

AI buildout

The appointment comes as vendors position themselves for an expected buildout of AI-capable infrastructure on a continent that remains a marginal player in global compute.

MTN Group chief technology and information officer Charles Molapisi said in May that Africa holds about 1% of the world’s computing power, warning that it risks “exporting raw data” the way it has long exported raw minerals.