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JIMMY MOYAHA: Convergence Partners has met the conditions that [were set] by the Competition Commission, or the lack of conditions for the deal with Datacentrix – to acquire Datacentrix from Alviva. Those conditions have all gone through and there’s been an unconditional approval from the Competition Commission, as well as from the Independent Communications Authority, Icasa, which is allowing the acquisition or the takeover to take place.

I’m joined on the line by Convergence Partners’ chair Andile Ngcaba to take a look at this. Mr Ngcaba, thanks so much for the time. Lovely to speak to you again. The last time you and I spoke, we spoke about your Digital Infrastructure Fund. We spoke in November about the fact that this was essential for development on the continent. You’re just buying everything up now.

ANDILE NGCABA: [Laughter] As you know, the market is consolidating on almost every front. Size matters here, given what’s happening in the world. When you look at the AI environment, companies like Nvidia and cloud companies, look at the size of these businesses today. In order to respond to that global ecosystem here, as everybody is preparing for the AI boom, we need to build solid companies. We need to have a solid foundation.

Datacentrix, with its history as a system integrator – one of the lead system integrators in this country, on the continent and in the Middle East – is that great foundation for us as we enter this new AI era.

And they [Datacentrix] have good relations with top OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] in the world like HPE [Hewlett Packard Enterprise]. Being a leading partner of HPE in Africa, they have been one of the most experienced leaders in this ecosystem of ours that has been running this business for years under Ahmed Mahomed. They’ve got great clients in banking, financial services, insurance, service providers, mobile companies, mining, oil and gas.

So really this is a great asset for South Africa. It’s a great asset for this industry, for the economy as a whole.

We’re very excited about this acquisition and this is a great platform for us to overlay, then, these artificial intelligence new applications that are needed by almost every sector of the economy. So we’re very excited about this.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Speaking of great assets, Andile, I want to look at you as an ICT professional. Last time we spoke we touched on the fact that you’ve got more than 30 years of experience in the space, in the ICT space. As someone with that much experience, how do you then sit down at the head of Convergence Partners and tell the next generation – and the board and the team that you’re working with – that we’re not positioning the business based on the knowledge of the past, we’re positioning it on the knowledge of the future, because you mentioned things around AI, and you mentioned these in the last conversation as well – around the fact that digital infrastructure is going to be the future, whether we’re dealing with high-frequency trading or whether we’re dealing with just sharing of data.

Everything rests on the infrastructure that it sits on. How do you, with so much experience, want to see a different side of this and look towards the future and not towards the past?

ANDILE NGCABA: Over 40 years now – not 30. I have over 40 years in the industry. Let me tell you, the fun part of this industry, basically why we are in technology, is because it changes very fast. It changes with almost lightning speed. Now you have to be able to understand the next-generation technology. I’ll give an example in mobile – 5G as a standard was adopted in 2019. We are now working on a 6G standard which will be adopted in 2027.

If you do not understand these generations of technology basically, you will definitely miss out. If you take the entire GPU [graphics processing unit] architecture in data centres, we talk about H100s today but Nvidia is launching Blackwell which is again a super machine that is really going to come up with human – what is called HAI [Human + AI] – not more ‘generative AI’. And this is something that is real.

So when you invest, you need to basically understand the past, the present and the future. And if you really are unable to calibrate these three phases in any path of technology, you literally can actually buy an old technology that has no future tomorrow.

So we have to understand and be able to work with multiple generations at the company. The young people coming out of university today, who have studied software engineering, computers, engineering, data science or AI, these are people you need in your team because they understand where the future is going.

But at the same time you need to have guys who have experience, who have been in the industry for some time, who understand where technology is coming from. It is that bringing of these two talented groups of people together and making them able to work together in harmony in building the future.

JIMMY MOYAHA: The future certainly looks bright, especially with leaders like you at the helm. Thank you so much for the time. We’ll leave it at that. Andile Ngcaba, the chair of Convergence Partners, on that acquisition of Datacentrix – finally getting the regulatory and Competition Commission approvals to go ahead.