Derek Friend Country Manager, StorVault Africa

StorVault Africa  has appointed a new country manager, Derek
Friend, who brings more than a decade of experience in the IT networking and
domestic ISP market segments to the table, having consulted on major projects
locally and throughout Africa and Europe.  

  Friend says it is hard not to get excited about the products
there are at StorVault Africa. "I am passionate about innovation and
technology and proud to represent a product that has a proven track record.
i365 holds 32 000 clients worldwide and is the global leader in the $9B market
of SAAS products, offering platform-agnostic solutions that address all
industry sectors, sizes of business as well as client data storage and disaster
recovery requirements."

When it comes to growth across all areas of the African
market, it is all about data and the cost of data capacity. "As a
continent, Africa is able to be much more
competitive with the rest of the world as a result of the new undersea cable
ventures such as WACS, EASY, and SEACOM. It is effectively forcing data costs
down, allowing more companies to work in the ‘cloud’ and adopting a ‘SaaS’
(software as a service) approach, which poses its own unique opportunities and
challenges," says Friend.

Resistance to change is a very real hurdle to overcome.
"Many IT managers are still ambivalent about the concept, while a large
percentage of enterprises on the opposite end of the spectrum are planning to
integrate some form of SaaS within the next two years. Small and medium-sized
businesses (SMEs) are adopting the technology much more aggressively and in
proportion to the growing need companies of all sizes to cut IT infrastructure
costs by any means necessary," explains Friend.

"I am determined to make EVault, Africa’s
first choice when it comes to back-up and recovery software as a service
(SaaS). StorVault’s managed service offerings into Africa
are offered exclusively through channel partners, which extends StorVault’s
reach in offering secure, reliable, world-class infrastructure that protects
business-critical data. It sets quite a challenge for me to build a
comprehensive country strategy that will focus on strategic partnerships by
offering superior enterprise technology to guide businesses through an
ever-evolving storage landscape," concludes Friend.