Internet Solutions’ Managing Director, Saki Missaikos profiled o
Internet Solutions’ Managing Director, Saki Missaikos profiled o
Saki Missaikos, the new Internet Solutions (IS) Managing Director was profiled on the technology news site, Techcentral.
In his interview by Duncan McLeod, Saki admits to be being a geek at heart, and says technology is one of his favourite hobbies.
“I had a love from a very young age for maths and science,” he says. That led him to the University of the Witwatersrand, where he began studying towards a BSc degree in electrical engineering. It was at Wits that he first met IS co-founder Ronnie Apteker, now a movie maker, and its future CEO, David Frankel.
Realising he wasn’t keen on the “heavy current stuff”, he did his final-year thesis on the-then nascent TCP/IP protocol, which forms the underpinning of the Internet and most modern communications networks.
Upon graduating, his parents were keen that the young Missaikos find stable employment. That led him into the graduate recruitment programme at First National Bank. With one of the largest computer networks in the country at the time — based on the now outdated OSI protocols favoured by IBM — Missaikos quickly found a home in the bank’s research and development division.
It was geek heaven. “All the vendors would bring in their latest modems and switches,” he says. “From Cisco Systems to Bay Networks, I just dabbled with technology all day long. We’d just look at technology and decide which of it would be applicable to FNB.”
He says he quickly “fell in love” with Cisco’s technology, which was all based on TCP/IP. But, he says, TCP/IP was “a swear word in all banks”.
“The quickest way to get kicked out of a bank was to talk about TCP/IP. It came from the US military and was synonymous with hackers and techies.”
It wasn’t long, though, before Missaikos was buried head-first in the fast-evolving world of the Internet protocol. He was hired at FNB-owned telecoms business, FirstNet, with CEO Mike van den Bergh — who now runs Vodacom’s Gateway Communications subsidiary — becoming his “first real boss”.
FirstNet was beginning to build virtual private networks (VPNs) based on TCP/IP and looking to win outsourced networking business from corporate SA. In the early 1990s, Missaikos helped set up a separate VPN business in FirstNet, built using Cisco’s Internet protocol networking gear.
As part of his work at FNB, Missaikos was invited to talk to master’s students about how the bank was using communications technology and about how it had deployed a TCP/IP-based network. “There were two guys at the back of the audience, Ronnie Apteker and Thomas McWalter [who co-founded IS with Apteker], and the questions kept coming,” he remembers. “After the talk, they came and asked me even more questions. They had started IS at Wits.”
About a year later, they called Missaikos and offered him a job. “I told my parents I was leaving the bank and going to a start-up and didn’t know how they were going to pay me yet.”
His mom was horrified, but the move proved highly fortuitous as IS quickly went on to become the biggest business-focused Internet service provider in the country, signing up some of SA’s biggest blue-chip companies as clients, before the company was bought by Dimension Data in two tranches in the late 1990s.
By 2002, though, Missaikos was itching to move onto pastures new. But Allan Cawood, who until last month headed Dimension Data’s Africa and Middle East division, offered him a job running sales and marketing. Though his first love was still technology, he had recently completed an MBA and had already moved into more of a business development role at IS.
When he first took on the role, Dimension Data was going through deep financial pain. The dot-com bubble had burst and IT spending had dried up after the Y2K date-change nonevent. “I loved the challenge and we had a superb time, including expanding into new geographies.”
This year, though, Missaikos was given the opportunity to take the reins at IS. Its MD, Derek Wilcocks, was being promoted to take over from Cawood. Dimension Data Africa chairman Andile Ngcaba first broached the idea with him. “It’s very difficult to say no to Andile. He’s like SA’s Steve Jobs and is driven by his love of technology.”
To relax, Missaikos says he is a keen golfer, though only in the corporate context — he doesn’t play at weekends. Like many of his senior colleagues at Dimension Data, he’s also an avid cyclist and often gets out on the road with group chairman Jeremy Ord. But his first love remains technology and he says he often “fights” with his “close mate” Mayan Mathen, the chief technology officer of Dimension Data Middle East & Africa, over who first gets to play with the “latest and greatest” gadgets they get their hands on.”