Teraco CEO Lex van Wyk will step down as CEO of the giant South African data centre operator at the end of the year, the company said on Monday.

Van Wyk will be replaced by MD Jan Hnizdo, who has been an executive director of Teraco since 2011, having initially joined the firm in the position of chief financial officer. He has served as MD since early last year.

Van Wyk is one of the founders of Teraco and has been its CEO since 2013. “In this time, he has been instrumental in growing the business from its early stages as a start-up data centre in Cape Town to Africa’s largest data centre,” it said in a statement.

“Van Wyk and his Teraco team also played a pivotal role during this time to change the South Africa telecommunications landscape. As the first vendor-neutral data centre in Africa, Teraco also launched Africa’s largest Internet exchange, NAPAfrica, in 2012. This changed the way the African continent accessed content, while also making the Internet more easily available, and at a significantly reduced cost.”

Teraco is the largest provider of data centre co-location space in Africa with more than 50MW of available critical power load, 20 000sq m of built-out co-location space and 16 000 interconnections between its ecosystem of carriers, content and cloud providers, outsourced service providers and enterprise partners.

‘Carefully planned’

“It has been an honour for me to help build such a phenomenal business, but after 11 years, I feel that the timing is right to step aside,” said van Wyk.

He said the transition, with Hnizdo taking the CEO reins, has been “carefully planned over the last few years”.

“Jan has a proven track record of delivering value to all stakeholders within the Teraco community and is the natural successor to implement Teraco’s strategy for the market opportunities that lie ahead.”