TechCentral (main feed)

Amazon’s Leo satellite constellation is coming to South Africa in 2027 through Herotel. TechCentral deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen speaks to Herotel CEO Van Zyl Botha about Evry, the brand that will sell Amazon Leo to South African homes, and about how a company with no local licence walked into a market that has kept Starlink out for years.

Botha explains why low-Earth orbit satellite technology changes the equation for anyone living beyond the reach of fibre and fixed-wireless services.

He addresses the awkward questions directly:

• How does Amazon get in without giving up 30%?

• Does a wholesale-retail split leave anything behind in the country?

• Would he sign the same deal with Starlink tomorrow?

• What about the regulatory asymmetry?

Also covered: what Evry is likely to cost; why studies on the market’s size range from 480 000 to 2.4 million potential customers; why Herotel is taking registrations for a service that has not launched commercially anywhere; whether Evry will cannibalise Herotel’s own fibre and wireless base; what Vodacom’s stake in Maziv means for Herotel’s independence; and why LEO satellites are viable now when the idea is 40 years old.

Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral

Discovery group CIO Derek Wilcocks on personalised Vitality, the limits of AI coding and why growth beats cost-cutting.

Derek Wilcocks, group CIO at Discovery, says AI has finally given the group the ability to do something it has wanted to do since Vitality launched more than 25 years ago: personalise it.

Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Wilcocks said Personal Health Pathways is built on AI models trained on member data collected since 2000, and used only with a member’s consent. For most of Vitality’s history, the targets were identical for everyone. The programme can now suggest a walk, a glucose test or a cancer screening rather than a run.

Wilcocks spent 23 years at Dimension Data, now NTT Data, where he ran Internet Solutions, served as group CIO and led the Middle East and Africa business as CEO. He was the 12th person to join Internet Solutions and founded a subsidiary that sold the first firewalls into South Africa’s banks. He joined Discovery in 2018.

In the discussion, he is candid about the limits of AI in software development. Discovery is measuring efficiency gains of roughly 20-25% in some areas from AI coding tools, but developers in large corporates were spending only a quarter to a third of their time writing code to begin with. Senior developers use all the major agentic coding frameworks, though the group has spent heavily on guardrails constraining what those tools are allowed to do.

Wilcocks also discusses:

• Why Discovery’s health and life businesses buy no traditional enterprise software, developing everything from scratch;

• Why he thinks Elon Musk is right about the direction but wrong about the timing on the end of source code, and the three problems standing in the way – explainability, efficiency and maintainability;

• Why the decade in which knowing how to code was enough to walk into a job has come to an end;

• How a federated model with around 14 CIOs across the group is held together by mandatory central security, privacy and ethics functions – and what happened when Discovery’s data scientists were asked to simplify the AI rules written for them;

• Why he sees AI at Discovery as primarily a growth story rather than a cost-cutting one, with staff retrained and redeployed rather than cut; and

• His route into computers, from a Commodore Vic-20 with 4KB of memory to the father who cured him of wanting to be an electrical engineer.

Don’t miss any of the other great interviews on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO. TechCentral

Steven Boykey Sidley has been a chief technology officer at a Fortune 500 company, a private equity investor, a videogame designer, a jazz musician and, for the past four years, a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg. He is a partner at Bridge Capital, heading its futures advisory, and the author of eight books – two of them on bitcoin and crypto – with another due in October.

TechCentral deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen spoke to him about the moment money finally became native to the internet, why the South African Reserve Bank appears to be walking in the opposite direction, and what AI is quietly doing to science and schooling while everyone argues about chatbots. TechCentral

For most of business history, buying technology meant owning it. Capital was set aside, servers and laptops were hauled into the building alongside the software licences, and the business then sweated those assets for as long as it practically could.

In the age of AI, that logic is starting to break. Kit bought today can be obsolete in two or three years, chips are in short supply and the companies pulling ahead are no longer those that own the most but those that can adapt the fastest.

In this episode of TCS+, Shane van der Merwe, head of technology finance at Merchant West, explains why the shift from owning technology to simply accessing it is gathering pace.

Van der Merwe unpacks:

• What is driving businesses to let go of owning their technology stack;

• Why hardware — the physical "tin" — has been the last thing to move to a subscription model, long after software did;

• Whether this is a corporate trend only, or whether cash-conscious SMEs are moving too;

• How the rise of AI is accelerating the move away from owned kit;

• The global chip-supply squeeze, and the tiering that can leave South Africa further back in the queue;

• Whether being in the cloud is a competitive advantage in itself;

• What obsolescence really costs a business, even on equipment that is already "paid off";

• How the shift from capex to opex changes the balance sheet — and what happens to the IT team;

• What a Merchant West solution looks like end to end, including how Popia-compliant data destruction is handled when old kit is returned;

• The circular-economy angle, in which returned devices are given a second life rather than being scrapped; and

• How getting this right frees up cash and keeps a business competitive in its core operations, not just its IT.

Don't miss the discussion.

This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned. TechCentral

For small and medium enterprises, technology must do one thing above all else: get out of the way. Unlike large corporations with dedicated IT departments, SMEs run lean – and every hour spent wrestling with systems is an hour not spent on the business itself.

In this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, brought to you by iStore Business, Sudesh Pillay, executive head of iStore Business South Africa, and Tamia Nontsikelelo, founder and CEO of womenswear label Tol’Thema, explore how SMEs can make smarter technology decisions and why the Apple ecosystem is increasingly the answer.

They discuss:

The pressures SMEs face and why low-maintenance, cost-effective technology is critical to their survival and growth;

How Tol’Thema uses iPhone and Mac in the day-to-day running of the business, and the practical value they deliver to customers;

Why historically fragmented SME IT is giving way to integrated ecosystems, and what is driving the shift;

The total cost of ownership case for Apple hardware, and why the premium price tag isn’t the whole story for budget-conscious businesses;

How Apple’s on-device AI, built into its silicon, helps SMEs future-proof their hardware investment;

The support iStore Business provides to ease hardware transitions and reduce the disruption of moving staff onto a new operating system;

Why native security and data protection features matter enormously to small businesses with no dedicated IT or compliance function; and

Which software and AI subscription costs SMEs can avoid by making better use of tools built into the Apple ecosystem.

Pillay also explains what happens when an SME’s needs outgrow out-of-the-box solutions, and how iStore Business provides the specialist support to scale with them.

Don’t miss this practical conversation about technology that works for South Africa’s small businesses. TechCentral