Gert Schoonbee has been named as the new MD of IT outsourcing specialist T-Systems in SA, replacing Mardia van der Walt-Korsten, who is moving on to a role as regional head of the company’s newly created Africa region.

Schoonbee, who will take on the new role on 1 April, is the company’s vice-president of sales.

Van der Walt-Korsten, who will also chair the SA business, says that SA previously formed part of T-Systems Europe, Middle-East and Africa and reported into the head office in Germany. T-Systems SA will now report into the new T-Systems Africa business.

T-Systems is the corporate customer arm of Germany’s telecommunications giant, Deutsche Telekom.

The growth of the company’s Africa operations makes it more practical to report to Johannesburg, particularly as the city is proving to be a hub for African businesses more broadly, says Van der Walt-Korsten.

“We looked at our customer set and, of our top customers, 70% have Africa expansion plans in progress,” she says. One of Van der Walt-Korsten’s responsibilities will be a business development role looking for “new markets, new territories, potential customers, opportunities for existing ones, and looking at which partnerships need to be forged in those spaces”.

One of T-Systems core growth areas is cloud computing and providing services to customers that are accessed remotely via the Internet. With consistent connectivity still a challenge in Africa, Van der Walt-Korsten says the company wants to create partnerships in new regions to facilitate connectivity.

Schoonbee says the company began reassessing its approach to the African market in mid-2011. “We realised Africa’s growth and our customers’ movements mean we have to look at the region differently.”

T-Systems SA’s stiffest competition comes from Dimension Data, Business Connexion and Bytes Technology Group. Van der Walt-Korsten says she expects some of these players to provide competition in other African markets, too, along with “non-SA players, particularly the Indian and Chinese companies that are quite active in Africa”. — Craig Wilson, TechCentral