Google Cloud appoints Niral Patel as Regional Director, Sub-Saharan Africa

“We have been seeing strong customer momentum in Africa, and companies ranging from digital natives to large corporations are coming to us to help them digitally transform and reinvent their business models,” said Abdul Rahman Al Thehaiban, Managing Director, Turkey, Middle East and Africa at Google Cloud. “We are thrilled to have Niral join us as we accelerate the next stage of growth with our local teams, partners and customers. He brings a wealth of experience to the Google Cloud family.”

Google Cloud is the world’s third-largest cloud computing infrastructure provider after Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. In September 2019, the global tech giant announced Digicloud as an official Google Cloud distributor in Africa to target a more expansive set of markets than the traditional financial centres.

In a statement, Google explained that major economic centres such as Nigeria in the west and Ethiopia in the east are driving the movement towards cloud technology. This phenomenon is permeating to the smaller economies in the region as well. However, these economies remain underserved regarding cloud technology, which Google is looking to rectify.

Patel, who is said to be based in Johannesburg, will focus on supporting the growth and scale of Google Cloud customers across various industries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Apart from Google, global tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are also keen in their resolve to invest in data centre infrastructure in Sub Saharan Africa. Microsoft has already opened two data centres in South Africa (Johannesburg and Cape Town) to provide Azure cloud services to clients, while AWS in 2020 opened its first data centre “region” in Cape Town.