After Christo Briedenhann matriculated, he visited an old school friend who was studying a BSc in computer science. It was there he heard about computer programming and thought it would be a good idea to get involved, as he had always enjoyed developing things.
Briedenhann kicked off his career as an infantry officer in the South African Defence Force. In 1982, he joined Infoplan (now SITA) as a Cobol programmer and mainframe systems analyst, where he wrote mainframe programs for its financial management systems - some of which are still being used today.
After realising that programming was not his true calling, he steered his career path towards sales, where he became an account manager for the South African Navy. After a short stint as account manager for the South African Navy, Briedenhann moved into a more commercial IT sales role, and it is what he has been doing ever since. To give him an extra boost, Briedenhann completed a BCom degree through Unisa and specialised in business economics (finance, sales and marketing).
After working for Infoplan for about 13 years, Briedenhann wanted to move into a more commercial environment, and so in 1995, he joined Compuware as a business development manager. "This was a new experience and I really enjoyed working with commercial companies," he comments.
QData (now Business Connexion) then made him an offer to run its video conferencing, network management and interactive distant learning business unit where he was for four years.
Thereafter, Briedenhann joined Datacentrix as a senior account manager where he began focusing more on enterprise sales or selling solutions. "I asked Gerhard Uys, CEO of Datacentrix, and sales director, Klaas Lammers, if they would let me start a new business unit focusing on storage and enterprise servers," he adds. This business unit is still a major contributor to Datacentrix and it has sold numerous enterprise solutions throughout the years. With Briedenhann doing very well at selling enterprise technologies, ADIC (now Quantum) made him an offer to come aboard as country manager for Africa and the Middle East. He was with ADIC for approximately five years before joining Riverbed.
Briedenhann was part of the Riverbed team for almost eight years, and he says it was one of his greatest career choices. "I met so many people and made a lot of new friends during these years. It was also great to deal with old friends and colleagues."
When Briedenhann joined Riverbed, the brand and its products were quite unknown in South Africa. His task was to bring new partners on board and find new end-users. It wasn't easy to establish and build a new technology brand in the South African market, as products like Expand, Cisco and many others were years ahead of Riverbed, with many of the resellers already engaged with their bandwidth optimisation technologies.
Networks Unlimited and Datacentrix were the first partners to work with Riverbed. With the support of Networks Unlimited, Briedenhann established an entire channel that is still selling this technology in the African market. Briedenhann also employed a team of professionals to help him drive and develop the Riverbed business across Africa.
Taking on SimpliVity
When SimpliVity first contacted Briedenhann, he was not too eager to leave Riverbed. "But then Klaus Seidl (VP of sales for the EMEA region) invited me for lunch, and during the lunch he introduced me to the SimpliVity technology. I immediately realised this is the next big thing."
Briedenhann joined SimpliVity in July of this year, and has been amazed at how well African customers are embracing the new technology. "I strongly believe it has been a great move to join SimpliVity as this is clearly the next big thing in IT, and I really want to associate myself with market leaders in the IT industry."
For the past 20 years and looking ahead, Briedenhann's main focus has been on storage, networking and enterprise servers, as he believes it holds a great future with some great innovations coming up.
The big data conundrum keeps Briedenhann on his toes. "Old technologies cannot be used to handle today's data problem. Companies will have to start adopting new storage technologies in order to stay competitive," he says. Current I/O speeds do not perform at the same rate as hard drives and this causes many issues and response problems.
"SimpliVity offers enterprise capabilities at cloud economics, which gives customers the best of both worlds. I believe SimpliVity, with its OmniCube technology, is the only company that addresses the entire data problem. SimpliVity OmniCube stands out in a rapidly growing market with its unique vm-centric architecture that dramatically simplifies the way IT works, and it delivers up to three times TCO savings.
Where is SimpliVity headed?
Briedenhann believes SimpliVity offers the greatest IT technologies available today. It is still a new company, but has already proved massive successes in the global IT world. "If you take into consideration that three-and-half years were invested in developing the technology, then it must be a winner," he says. In a very short time, the company has won numerous awards, and in June 2014, SimpliVity was been positioned in the Visionary quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integrated Systems.
CIOs are constantly faced with IT budget restraints, but SimpliVity's technology addresses the main requirements for IT in the business world today. In Africa, we have problems like a lack of skills, power issues and shortages and budget constraints. It is time to change, and SimpliVity addresses these basic requirements with world-class technology by combining enterprise capabilities with cloud economics.
Striking a balance between work and play
When Briedenhann is not in the office, he enjoys spending time with his wife, five daughters and their families. His grandchildren keep him very busy. He also enjoys spending time with friends around a game of golf, fishing or out in the bush.
"Gardening is a big passion of mine, but there isn't enough time. Every now and then my oldest daughter and her husband convince me to do a mountain bike trial with them, which is something I should do more often. My wife and I love travelling and we try to incorporate this with my business travels," he concludes.
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