Within a couple of months after announcing its new strategy and direction, CipherWave reports that it has transitioned into an ‘enabler of enablers’, unlocking opportunities for its customers.
CEO Shamith Maharaj, who officially stepped into the role on 1 December 2023, says CipherWave now delivers an end-to-end, secure, managed, application-aware experience across the full OSI stack.
“We have moved at the speed of light to meet the changing needs of our customers, with a key focus on transforming our products, services and values to more next-gen, AI-driven, customer-led solutions. From a business perspective, we have had a series of internal workshops with the executive team to review the business’s products and services and where we see these going,” he says.
“We concluded we needed to retain our existing product families, but we also wanted to transform into a next-generation business enabler. We have expanded our solutions and services portfolios and upskilled our teams in line with this vision. We have evolved to offer all the solutions our customers need to fix real-world issues and allow them to focus on growing their core businesses,” he says.
Among the key challenges CipherWave is helping customers address is embedding security throughout their infrastructure, and achieving infrastructure that supports their growth into new regions across Africa. Managed services and embedded, best-of-breed security are new directions for CipherWave, to help customers overcome challenges and simplify operations.
Trusted partner for African expansion
Maharaj adds: “We see growing demand for support as our South African customers expand into new geographies across the African continent. We understand that Africa is open for business, and with massive growth forecast for the African market, we are committed to supporting customers as they venture into new geographies.”
He says common challenges for businesses growing across Africa include sourcing trusted technology partners in new regions, and billing and payments in multiple geographies.
Maharaj says: “When customers venture into many countries, they don’t need to source and work with multiple unknown partners across regions – as an aggregator, we take away this complexity. We also bill them in rands, in South Africa. They have a recognised, reputable South African entity they work with, which mitigates risk to the business. We have strong fulfilment and assurance capabilities to support the solutions we offer in the market. We also have partnerships with key partners across the continent to help them scale and simplify their deployments. We have the know-how and experience to roll out into Africa, and we are committed to opening the doors into African markets for our customers.”
Comprehensive offerings
CipherWave now offers a diverse range of solutions across connectivity, cloud, voice, professional services and security.
Maharaj says: “We support customers from the physical layer, through to the application layer. What this means is very focused application services that drive the customer business, with more SDN-enabled connectivity services, including SASE solutions, to optimise the customer experience – with best-of-breed security built in. In the cloud arena, we will continue to invest in our cloud solution, but will accelerate our growth and partnerships with all the major hyperscalers in Africa to provide more XaaS solutions.
“From a voice perspective, we are moving to more AI-driven unified communications solutions with integration into social media, chatbot and new messaging platforms,” he says.
To address higher demand for security across the stack, CipherWave is committed to ensuring the solutions it provides include end-to-end security. “When we present a solution, we will provide all the security built-in,” he says.
CipherWave’s tailored packages and competitive pricing are designed to support businesses of all sizes, Maharaj says. “What we are doing to make solutioning easy, is we can package lite, economy and premium options based on business requirements and budgets – from SMEs to resellers to enterprises and the wholesale market.”
CipherWave notes that its core customer-centric approach will not change, however. Says Maharaj: “We will continue to prioritise building lasting relationships with our customers, encouraging their feedback and working with them to achieve continuous improvement.”
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