You probably knew Riyaz Bachani during his tenure as CTO at Wananchi and Kenya Data Networks. Riyaz was in charge of Wazi Wifi and was the Wananchi Group Chief Technology Officer. He was also the founding CTO at Kenya Data Networks (now Liquid Telecom (K) Limited).
The MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) B.S holder has joined Kenya’s Angani, a cloud services firm founded last year as its Chief Operating Officer (COO) where he will be in charge driving Angani growth and help the firm scale its operations and expand its presence across the region.
“Riyaz is a brilliant manager and great technologist who will help Angani scale throughout the region,” said Phares Kariuki, Angani’s co-founder and CEO. “These qualities, combined with his vision for the Internet in Africa and experience with rolling out networks regionally, make Riyaz a great addition to the team.”
Riyaz also serves on the boards of the iHub Nairobi and Africa’s Talking Limited. He also serves on the Technical Committee of the Kenya Internet Exchange Point. Riyaz will drive the firm’s capacity to meet client’s demands as according to Phares since going live with services at the end of 2013, Anagni has seen high demand for services as a number of firms migrate from hosting of business applications at their premises to the cloud.
“From email, to client relationship management solutions, voice over internet solutions and file back up are some of the applications that businesses are taking up. Others include virtual servers from which they run their applications. Affordable pricing and relative ease of set up are among the reasons businesses are migrating to the cloud. We have also gained trust from a number of firms due to the vast skill-set and experience of our team with experts like Riyaz,” he says.
“Businesses are realising its more cost effective to focus on their core activity rather than spend capital investing in servers and skills required to manage such IT set ups, it doesn’t improve a firms competitiveness to run their own IT infrastructure if they are not an IT infrastructure company. Additionally, firms are finding cloud based applications have more uptime than those hosted internally and are accessible on any internet enabled device, ” adds Phares.