New Country Manager for Africa Positions BMC for African Growth Boom

Spiro Zambelis has been appointed as the new BMC Regional Sales Manager and Country Manager for South Africa and Africa. Zambelis who has been with BMC for four years, assumed his new role from 1 October.

“Zambelis’s role will involve looking after and growing the African market. His responsibilities will include overseeing the BMC Enterprise Service Management (ESM) business in Africa working with our business partners to grow the BMC business in Sub-Saharan Africa,” says Vice President for Iberia, the Middle East and Africa, Paul Cant. BMC recently re-categorised Sub-Saharan Africa from being an emerging market to an investment growth region and is looking to aggressively grow this market segment and establish itself as a significant player in the market. We believe that Zambelis’s existing relationships with partners and customers will be an asset going forward and something that can be leveraged as we grow this market segment,” says Cant.

Zambelis has extensive experience in the African market, having established and grown strategic partnerships in Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria. He will focus on growing the market across South Africa and Africa and is busy doubling the sales head count to build the necessary internal capacity to capture the predicted growth.

“Looking ahead, BMC South Africa and Africa will focus mainly on IT Operations Management, including automation, monitoring, optimisation of IT infrastructure usage and service management,” says Zambelis. “We expect automation to play a major role across Africa as firms move from manual to automated processes. There will also be growth in software as a service (SaaS). But the main shift in IT will be the growth of cloud computing,” says Zambelis.

Africa, despite being home to billions of people who don’t even own a computer, much less an internet connection, may ironically be one of the places that will benefit dramatically from cloud computing. Africa is a fertile ground for cloud computing, because it paves the way for mobile applications on the cloud. According to data from the World Bank, while only an estimated 140 million out of one billion people on the continent use the Internet, there are 600 million mobile phone users.

Africa’s shortcomings in wired infrastructure have made the region a good place for cloud adoption. One of the key results of the lack of decent and affordable wired services is that people have instead adopted mobile application services. Compared to wired internet, the deployment of mobile bandwidth in Africa is significantly easier, both from a financial and cultural perspective.

“The influx of sea cables into Africa opening up data communication will enable the growth of cloud computing as a phenomenon on the continent. The key thing with cloud technology is not to be locked in to one supplier but to operate within a heterogeneous environment. This is BMC’s greatest vantage point as it is what we do best. It is an exciting time for BMC in Africa as we are perfectly positioned to take advantage of this next growth boom on the continent. We can provide operations management across the board in heterogeneous environments. We aim to leverage our existing partner network and grow key strategic relationships to grow our market share – in this way enabling Africa for Africans,” concludes Zambelis.