The appointment earlier this year of (Frederick) Gideon Coetzee as the General Manager: Networking and Storage Division at Networks Unlimited brings a wealth of IT and entrepreneurial experience into this arena of the company.
Known to all by his middle name, Gideon Coetzee is a confident executive with around 20 years’ professional experience in developing and implementing business and sales strategies, building high performance teams for solution selling at chief experience officer levels, and driving synergies in order to achieve business efficiencies to maximise revenues and profitability. His career is too extensive to include all the stops along the way here, but some highlights are mentioned below.
Having begun his IT career in distribution around component sales, Coetzee moved quickly into selling vendor solutions, before getting into the business side of distribution working with large corporates and banks, and thereafter into networking and data centres dealing with servers, storage and network solutions.
His experience also includes time on the ground in west and east Africa, predominantly in Zambia, where his challenge lay in helping to get the business back into profitability after three years of a loss situation. Other time-periods in Rwanda and Kenya saw Coetzee using technology across different business verticals in order to create new strategies for new revenue streams, and providing leadership and direction to the sales and management teams.
Having been approached by the International Data Corporation, Coetzee began a new business unit for the organisation to consult to various companies. He was then involved with Telkom during the period when it needed to change its business from legacy solutions to virtual, with the need to embrace the adoption of cloud technologies and the big changes taking place at the time in the technology landscape.
He explains: “I am adaptable for both networking and storage as well as cyber security, which has been a focus during the past eight years of my career. I have a keen interest and expertise in best practices in business and management and technology, and specifically in how to use technology to improve best practices in business and management.
“As a business technology consultant, we need to be trusted partners with the C-suite executives and help them to validate their IT decisions. Networks Unlimited’s experience and presence across sub-Saharan Africa allows us to provide strategic insights to assist our clients and help them make innovative yet fact-based decisions on their technology purchases and strategies by providing our global and regional expertise on technology opportunities and trends. In this way, we provide strategic insights to help clients achieve their key business objectives.”
For more information please contact Michelle Naidoo, (+27) 011 202 8400 michelle.naidoo@nu.co.za
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Networks Unlimited
Networks Unlimited is a value-added distributor, committed to empowering African businesses through innovative technology solutions. Our focus includes the world's leading security, networking, storage, enterprise system management (ESM) and cloud technologies. As a company, we are dedicated to taking our partner ecosystem to new heights. We support our partners through operational excellence, a competitive pricing strategy and strong focus on education, with the view of investing in long-term relationships. We work with competitive, resilient businesses, who are leaders in their field of excellence.
Our offerings include a portfolio of products highly regarded by Gartner, such as Altaro, Attivo Networks, Cofense, Fortinet, F5, Hitachi Vantara, NETSCOUT, NVIDIA, ProLabs, RSA, Rubrik, SentinelOne, SevOne, Silver Peak, Tenable, Tintri and Uplogix.