Google has appointed former Oracle South Africa MD Niral Patel as head of its cloud operations in sub-Saharan Africa.
Patel’s formal title is regional director at Google Cloud, which is the world’s third largest cloud computing infrastructure provider after Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. He will be based in Johannesburg.
“He will have overall responsibility for the company’s sales strategy and continued development of its go-to-market sales operations,” Google said in a statement on Tuesday. “Patel will be focused on supporting the growth and scale of Google Cloud customers across a variety of industries.”
Prior to Oracle, Patel held various leadership roles at Microsoft, IBM and Hitachi.
“We have been seeing strong customer momentum in Africa, and companies ranging from digital natives to large corporations are coming to us to help them digitally transform and reinvent their business models,” said Abdul Rahman Al Thehaiban, MD for Turkey, Middle East and Africa at Google Cloud, in the statement.
Unlike rivals Microsoft and AWS, Google has said little about its investments in data centre infrastructure in the region. Microsoft has opened two data centres in South Africa to provide Azure cloud services to clients — one in Johannesburg and the other in Cape Town. AWS, meanwhile, recently opened its first data centre “region” in Cape Town. – © 2021 NewsCentral Media
