ICT industry veteran Andile Ngcaba‘s inq. has appointed Dr. Christian Wirtz as its new Group CEO from 1 April 2021. Dr Wirtz, currently an Executive in Group Enterprise at MTN, will be taking over from founding Group CEO Geoff Hardwick who has stepped down from the role.
Dr Wirtz is an industry veteran with a wealth of telco and enterprise business experience having worked for more than two decades in the ICT sector across Africa and Europe.
“We are excited to have Christian joining us. He has traversed industry-leading organisations such as McKinsey, Vodafone, Vodacom and most recently MTN,” inq.’s Chairperson Ngcaba said.
“His experience will be invaluable in taking inq. to the next level.”
Founded in 2013, inq. is a leading enterprise solutions provider in 7 countries across Africa.
The pan-African multi-cloud digital service provider has a vision to change the way Africa does digital services bringing to market very relevant suite of next-generation technology solutions in the fields of Edge, AI, SDN/NFV, Cloud and Security.
Dr Wirtz will accelerate the digital transformation of the business.
“At inq. we are driven by the immense benefits that digital services can bring to Africa and to the companies and communities in the countries we operate in,” said Wirtz.
“We believe that our “cloud-first” approach and our “AI-driven” product developments will ensure an accelerated growth and will position us well for partnerships with other players in this field. Therefore, I am thrilled by the huge potential of inq. and I am convinced of its success across the continent.”
Also read: Andile Ngcaba’s inq Wants to be Africa’s Number one AI Service Provider
inq. wants to be Africa’s number one artificial intelligence (AI) service provider.
The company has points of contacts in 12 African cities, Johannesburg, Gaborone, Lusaka, Ndola, Blantyre, Lilongwe, Mzuzu, Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Kanu and Abidjan.
inq. is formerly known as Synergy Communications.
It has concluded the 100% acquisition of Vodacom Business Africa’s operations in Nigeria, Zambia and Cote d’Ivoire with a further planned acquisition in Cameroon pending regulatory approvals. For more read: Andile Ngcaba’s Firm Buys Three Vodacom Business Africa Operations
inq.’s flagship investments included Internet Solutions Mozambique, Skyband Malawi and, most recently, Virtual Business Network Services in Botswana.
Also read: Andile Ngcaba’s inq Partners with Nasdaq-Listed Enea
inq. has teamed up with Nasdaq and Stockholm-listed Enea.
The Pan-African cloud-based digital service provider has selected Enea NFV Access as the
virtualization and management software for the inq. universal CPE platform.
inq. will initially provide enterprises with managed services for security, software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN), and application delivery controllers (ADC’s), while expanding the portfolio with additional managed services.
The inq. universal CPE platform will ensure that all these services are well-positioned in terms of cost and performance.
The uCPE architecture with Enea NFV Access gives inq. the flexibility to offer a choice of
virtual network functions and the possibility of adding functionality on-demand to uCPE devices already deployed. It is orchestrated centrally through the inq. Control platform, which provides a single management console for an entire network.
