NetApp announces the appointment of Morne Bekker as the new South African Country Manager and District Manager for the SADC Region and he comes onboard as a mandate to develop the business for NetApp across the Southern African region.
His responsibilities will include the development and execution of sales and channel strategies, expanding the NetApp customer base, local skills development and enhancing the partner and alliances ecosystem.
“The appointment of Morne is indicative of the cusp in NetApp’s South African presence. Our recent acquisition of SolidFire and unique portfolio including the most comprehensive enterprise flash storage offering in the business, places us in a distinctive market position. We therefore require the right leadership as demonstrated by Morne, to execute strategy, develop long standing industry relationships and bring in new prospects,” states Fadi Kanafani, Regional Director for MEA at NetApp.
An avid sports person, with interests ranging from Golf, Cricket, Tennis Bekker also boosts a proven track record of sales achievements and wealth of experience while working with the likes of Internet Solutions, Datacentrix and Hewlett Packard in South Africa. Commenting on the recent change in his profile, Bekker said, “My professional journey gave me the necessary knowledge to understand how enterprise storage has evolved in recent years. Traditionally, large South African enterprises have been cautious when adopting the cloud. Reasons for this cloud lag have included long standing legacy systems and confusion around data sovereignty. This mind-set is slowly starting to shift as organisations start to pursue a hybrid cloud strategy, retaining a significant amount of storage capacity on-premises for reasons of performance, security, regulatory and compliance.”
