NEWS
South Africa based Altron announces new Group Executives for legal and investor relations
Zanele Salman
Lauren Wilson has been appointed to the role of Group Executive of Altron ’ s Legal Department , with Zanele Salman taking over as Group Executive of Investor Relations .
Zanele ’ s career spans two decades in business development , marketing , and investor relations , having worked for some of the JSE ’ s top 40 listed companies where she has led projects and initiatives across various elements of the value chain .
Over the course of her career Zanele has held numerous executive roles in South African companies including AECI , Sasol , and Nampak . Her wealth of experience includes a focus on research and development , operations optimisation , strategy , investor relations , business development , marketing and sales , communications as well as value creation .
At Altron , Zanele will take responsibility for all aspects of the Group ’ s investor relations . She will oversee the company ’ s engagement with the investment community , ensuring clear and transparent communication of Altron ’ s financial performance , growth strategy , and long-term value creation initiatives .
Lauren brings wide-ranging commercial and legal experience to the Group . She has previously held executive leadership roles in South African companies such as MTN and SAB , contributing to decisionmaking processes and the execution of strategic priorities .
In her career , she has managed procurement portfolios across South Africa and the entire Africa Zone . She also held earlier senior positions at MTN where she managed legal risk across 21 operations in Africa and the
Middle East . In that role she was primarily operating as a Mergers and Acquisitions , M & A attorney due to the strength of her commercial law skills .
At Altron , Lauren will bring her extensive expertise to bear on contract negotiation ensuring all projects and strategic business initiatives are appropriately navigated to deliver maximum value whilst meeting Altron ’ s required commercial objectives and deadlines . Her focus will include supporting the company ’ s capital allocation strategy , managing due diligence processes , and enhancing operational efficiency and market competitiveness .
Agri business , Al Dahra operating out of Egypt , migrates to Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS
Nutanix announced that Al Dahra , a global agribusiness company with operations across 20 countries , has successfully migrated its IT infrastructure to a Nutanix Cloud Clusters environment on Amazon Web Services . The move has resulted in a 10x improvement in the performance of businesscritical applications and a 60 % reduction in cloud costs , empowering the company to operate more efficiently and cost-effectively .
Al Dahra is a prominent multinational provider in agribusiness , operating over 400 thousand acres of agricultural land in Egypt , Romania , Serbia , USA , and others , specialised in the cultivation , production and trading of up to 3 million tons of essential food commodities and up to 3 million tons of animal feed . They faced a critical deadline to migrate out of its UAE-based data centre .
The company ’ s IT infrastructure , built over time through expansions and acquisitions , had become complex and siloed , consisting of three distinct environments , Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud , VMware , and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure . These systems created challenges in terms of performance , cost , and administrative overhead .
“ Our ERP system and other mission-critical applications were struggling with less than
Gagandeep Singh Hoda
optimal performance , regardless of the environment they were running on ,” said Gagandeep Singh Hoda , IT Manager at Al Dahra . “ Analysis revealed that the IOPS in each environment were insufficient , and upgrading hardware would have been too expensive .”
Hoda and his team decided to consolidate their environments into a single cloud-based solution , ultimately selecting Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS . “ Nutanix consistently performed the best across our environments , and we had a strong partnership with AWS , so the decision was clear ,” said Hoda .
The migration , which involved evaluation , procurement , deployment , and application migration , was completed in just four weeks . The simplicity of the procurement process via the AWS Marketplace , along with Nutanix Move , which migrated applications at no additional cost , made the transition seamless .
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