Featured Speakers

Aarti Takoordeen is a qualified CA, from the age of 24 years, younger than most, she paved her way through the Technology industry and becoming Finance Director by 29 years of age. Aarti is now the CFO of the JSE and excited about significantly contributing to the local South African environment for the first time in her career. Aarti is passionate about breaking the mould of traditional finance professionals and being seen as a value adding business partner in our professional sphere of influence. In 2014 Aarti received an CFO Award for Young Talent CFO.

Yasir Ahmed is the Chief Director for Transport Regulation in Cape Provincial Government’s Department of Transport and Public Works.

He graduated from the University of Cape Town with a degree in Civil Engineering and is registered with the Engineering Council of South Africa with a specialisation in Public Transportation planning, design and regulation.

Yasir heads up a team of officials who have managed to transform the way public transport, road safety and the government fleet is planned, managed and regulated in the Western Cape.

Having served as chairman of the Department of Transport and Public Works’ IT Committee since 2006, Yasir has been involved in the roll out of ECM in his directorates and the department as a whole.

He and his team have received regional and national awards for the their projects and individual achievements, including a Premier’s Service Excellence Award, Productivity SA awards and the National Minister of Transport’s sector awards in 2015.

Sean is the managing director of Redshift Cyber Security. Redshift was founded in 2015 to help companies understand the critical business assets that attackers are really after, the tools, techniques and motivations behind the attacks and how to defend against them. He is passionate about technology, privacy, security and a free and open internet. As a certified penetration tester, Sean has hacked into many South African and global companies to help expose security weaknesses in complex business environments. He is also a certified information security manager and has helped many large organizations develop a robust cyber security strategy to achieve resilience against modern cyber attacks.

Previously, Sean held the position of Head of Security Assurance South Africa at MWR Infosecurity where he managed a team of penetration testers and was responsible for the overall delivery and success of the business. He has worked on some of the largest and most extensive hacking simulations in the banking and telecoms sectors, often gaining full control of treasury, HR, payroll and core banking systems to highlight the true risks of a cyber attack.

After 8 years in the Stellenbosch tourism industry, Marilize Pieters joined the Distell IT Department 10 years ago.

Distell’s ECM journey started in 2005. As ECM Business Systems Analyst for Distell, Marilize has been instrumental in the last 5 years in the deployment, training and adoption of Distell’s ECM solution during a period the company has experienced restructuring and expansion both in South Africa and internationally. Distell today has 3,600 users of the OpenText solution, internally branded as Brandcrafters Online because each employee is regarded as a crafter of our 100+ wine, spirit and cider brands, of which many has been awarded the world’s best over the last 10 years.

Marilize has contributed to the analysis, implementation and adoption of the following solutions within Brandcrafters Online:

• Contracts management
• Gifts Register solution
• Conflict of Interest solution
• New user management
• Risk Incident Solution
• KineMatik Program and Project Management

Simon “Ted” Harrison is the Senior Vice President of Enterprise Sales at OpenText, and is responsible for OpenText’s Enterprise business unit. Ted previously served as the Senior Vice President of Fast Growth Markets for OpenText, growing the business in high potential regions world-wide including LATAM, Eastern Europe, Japan, Africa, China, Middle East and India.

Coming to OpenText through its IXOS acquisition, Ted has held a number of senior sales leadership roles throughout his 15 years with the company. Ted served as the Head of Global Services for Northern Europe before becoming Senior Vice President of Sales for the EMEA region.

Ted has successfully worked throughout his 25 year career to match business imperatives with innovative technology solutions. Beginning his career as a technical consultant, Ted then bridged the gap between technical and business to serve as a Senior Business Consultant on projects such as the European roll-out for General Motors. He has also worked in the mobile solutions field for Psion Teklogix, specializing in Supply Chain Optimization.

Ted holds an honors degree in Computer Science from Leeds University.

Simon Carpenter has 33 years of wide-ranging experience in the IT sector. The last 21 years have been with market-leader SAP’s African business where he has held a number of leadership positions. In the course of his career with SAP Simon is proud to have worked with many of Africa's best organisations helping them to understand how SAP solutions can contribute to their growth and ongoing success. He is a passionate advocate for leveraging information to create a better Africa for all.

Simon has contributed to SAP’s growth across Africa from 7 to over 1,300 customers by, inter alia:

• Leading SAP Africa’s Presales team and its involvement in winning new customers
• Launching solutions such as SAP BW, SAP CRM, SAP APO, SAP SCM, NetWeaver and SAP Financial Services Network into the market
• Founding and incubating services and concepts such as Customer Engagement Lifecycle, Value Engineering, Business Transformation Services and the SAP Reseller Channel
• Leading SAP’s Industry and Presales community
• Leading the Marketing and Customer Service functions
• Leading the Business Analytics Sales team where revenues grew by >25 % over 2 years
• Leading the SAP Premier Customer Network where revenues grew by 298% over 2 years
• Leading the Marketing and Customer Service functions

Simon is currently Chief Technology Advisor SAP Africa, responsible for:

• Leading Innovation and Thought leadership for SAP in the African market; providing direction to SAP’s customers and partners on emerging business and technology issues such as Business Network Transformation, Mobility, Cloud Computing Business Process Management.
• Stewardship of SAP’s Customer Ecosystem.
• Evangelism of SAP’s strategy for helping the World to Run Simpler.

Simon has worked predominantly in the area of operations and logistics solutions ranging from on-board computing in transport to large-scale enterprise systems. He has broad experience having worked in sales, marketing, support management, project management, and consulting and systems development. He thus has good insight into the soft issues (such as change management) that must be addressed for any technological initiative to be successful. Simon speaks at a numerous local and international conferences and Universities on a wide range of topics and is a previous award winner at the SAPICS conference.

Following an assignment in Egypt (1994), she was posted to the Embassy of Canada to Israel (1994-96). From 1998-2000, Ms. McCardell was an Advisor to the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina on the implementation of the Dayton Peace Accord at the state level. She was subsequently Political Counsellor at the Embassy of Canada to Lebanon (2002-2003). Most recently, Ms. McCardell was Ambassador to Libya (2009-2011) representing Canada both before and after the Libyan revolution. In Ottawa, Ms. McCardell has been Deputy Director of the East Adriatic Division, Director of the Executive Assignments Unit and Director of the Partnership Division of the Invest in Canada Bureau. Ms McCardell was most recently the Canadian Ambassador to Morocco and Mauritania (2012-2015). Ms. McCardell is married with three children.

Currently the head of stores systems for TFG, Iain has over 15 years experience in retail systems covering the full end to end retail process. An accountant by degree, he started his career with Unilever in management accounting, but soon converted to IT through a number of SAP implementation projects. He spent 8 years based in the UK working for companies like Ernst & Young, SAP, BMC Software and Symantec. During this time he managed a number of EMEA divisions and gained a wealth of cross country and cross technology experience. Iain and his family returned to South Africa in 2007 and he focused on in-store retail systems through working for UCS Software. It was during this time that he was introduced to the then Cordys technology stack. For the last five years, he has worked for The Foschini Group, responsible for the replacement of all of the in-store systems. Part of that replacement strategy has been the early adoption of the Open Text Business Process Suite which has been identified as the technology platform for all future non POS in-store applications.

Iain loves sport and is an avid Sharks fan, as well as an enthusiastic supporter of his children's many sporting activities.

Dr.Aaron Norman leads KineMatik’s Operations, focusing on Sales and Professional Services. He joined KineMatik in 2005 as a Senior Consultant, focusing on OpenText Content Server/ LiveLink solutions and leading implementations at major customers in industry and public sector organizations. He subsequently took on leadership of the Professional Services and Implementation teams, before becoming SVP of Operations in 2010.

Prior to joining KineMatik, Dr.Norman was a Project Manager at the Tyndall Institute in Cork, Ireland, where he managed project teams working on national and international projects in a range of sectors.

Dr Norman has a Ph.D. in Materials Chemistry from University College Cork.