Dennis Dykes is the Nedbank Group’s chief economist, a position he has held since May 1994. He is a council member of the Economic Society of South Africa and sits on a number of organised business committees. He is the author of many articles for in-house and external publications. Dennis has won three Economist of the Year awards, two from Reuters and one from Sake24. His qualifications include an honour’s degree from Bath University and a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics.

Dykes will share his expertise on the direction in which South Africa needs to go in order to recover the economy. The challenges and opportunities of this will be covered, and will set the scene for ICT infrastructure investment which will assist in strengthening the economy.

Phathizwe Malinga is passionate about the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and the impact it will have on Africa’s life expectancy. With IoT being the cornerstone of data-driven decision-making, he is exposed to amazing Africans, in business and society, using IoT and other 4IR technologies to continuously improve their products, services, and quality of life. He has been involved in the information technology and the telecommunications industry for over two decades. He completed his Executive MBA from the Graduate School of Business, Cape Town and is also a faculty member of Singularity University.

His presentation looks at repair times for remote infrastructure. When services stop in their remote infrastructure, a lot of service providers have to dispatch technicians multiple times as they do not know the cause of the outage. This results in costly maintenance and a longer mean time to repair (MTTR). The IoT changes all of that, and a low power network provides real-time visibility and to isolate and diagnose faults remotely, even if there’s no power. IoT drives innovation.

“ICT Infrastructure to fuel the growth of South Africa’s economy”.

Keynote speakers

George Debbo has been involved in the telecommunication industry for 40 years. He worked in an executive position within Telkom SA until 2000, at which time he left to join the vendor community. Within the vendor community he served as technical director for Marconi South Africa from 2000 to 2006 and as CTO for the Major Accounts Business Unit with Ericsson Sub-Saharan Africa between 2007 and 2012. Currently George is a director of George Debbo Telecoms, a consultancy specialising in assisting network operators, vendors and systems integration companies in the area of software definable networks (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV). George holds an MSc (Electrical Engineering) degree from the University of the Witwatersrand and is a registered Professional Engineer with the Engineering Council of South Africa. George is a fellow of the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers and is currently serving as president of the institute for 2019/2020.

His presentation will focus on multi access edge computing (MEC), one of the technologies that forms part of the current network evolution towards SDN and NFV. The presentation will discuss how SDN, NFV and MEC operate and their benefits, and will show work that is currently being carried out to model the use of MEC to provide telecommunication service to unserved rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Dennis Dykes

George Debbo

Phathizwe Malinga

Jacques du Toit is a highly regarded industry leader. With years of business experience in the telecoms industry, in 2013, Jacques was appointed CEO of Vox. Under his reign, Vox merged all its business units into one which saw Vox Orion, Vox Datapro, Vox Amvia, @lantic, Vox Telepreneur and Vox Pureview all being consolidated into Vox Telecom.

His presentation will address 5G: it’s the word “du jour” being bandied about in the marketplace with many claiming that it will replace fibre. But will it really? The reality is that 5G and fibre will never be mutually exclusive, and that viewpoint is exaggerated. There is still a lot of work to be done around the building of infrastructure. Big issues around the deployment of 5G in SA is the coverage area and spectrum allocation. But despite the challenges, there is a reason to be optimistic: SA ranks among the top 25 countries in the world in terms of quality of GSM networks, primarily as a result of having multinational telecommunications providers investing substantially in the country.

Based in Espoo, Finland, Janne Paananen is technology manager for the critical power solutions organisation for Eaton EMEA. Janne specialises in large UPS system solutions for datacenters and special applications. He has more than 15 years of experience with large three phase UPS products and has been working in after- and pre-sales organisations providing tailored UPS solutions, support and in-depth training world-wide. Janne is also a guest lecturer for educational institutes and participates in the international standardisation work around data centers.

Janne will be presenting on UPSs as a reserve. Future “Energy Aware UPS” not only protects the load against mains-related voltage and frequency anomalies. It can also intelligently leverage the connected energy storage systems to manage the power, flow of energy, to help to optimise energy usage and reduce cost of energy through demand response activities and support the grid to allow higher penetration of renewables.

Dr Happy Sithole oversees the developments of high performance computing in the country through the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), and the roll-out of broadband connectivity for all science councils and universities, through the SANReN. He supports megascience projects such as the SKA and LHC projects. He sits in steering committees for HPC in different countries and is also a board member of the National Library of South Africa, where he is the chair of the ICT Committee.

His presentation will discuss the country’s preparation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It has become clear that cyber-infrastructure will play a critical role in the country’s success in efficiently harnessing the available technologies.

Jacques du Toit

Dr Happy Sithole

Janne Paananen

“ICT Infrastructure to fuel the growth of South Africa’s economy”.

Keynote speakers