Cables to AI,
the long way up.

He joined to fix infrastructure and rebuilt the entire IT function, turning a reactive break-fix team into an engineering unit. He reports directly to the CEO on technology strategy and investment, and sits in HOD meetings. The step up to Head of IT came seven months in, after he rebuilt the infrastructure foundation everything downstream depended on.

• ▸Built a production conversational AI agent from zero, running daily under his ownership. 1.6 million customer conversations handled in a year at eighty-five percent satisfaction, higher than the human team it replaced. A full system: custom tooling, conversation flows, integrations, live monitoring, and two trained generations, every layer built in-house.
• ▸Seventy-plus infrastructure, security, internal-tooling, and automation projects shipped or in flight, in under two years. Some inherited, most he started. The register includes a full ISO 27001:2022 compliance programme, network switching upgrades, a guest WiFi captive portal, a PABX and progressive-dialer replacement, a company-wide Windows 11 migration, automated onboarding, offboarding, and role-change, a firewall rebuild with modern VPN and single sign-on, a virtualisation project, an endpoint-protection migration, cloud backup automation, workflow automation with data-loss prevention, server automation and playbooks, RMM automation, merchant reconciliation automation, automated ticketing, self-service process automation, server-room environmental monitoring, DNS and addressing hygiene, a naming and addressing-convention programme, an HR CV-parser, a chat-QA monitoring tool, a self-built automated asset register, an internal intranet, SOPs, imaging, and offsite backups.
• ▸Overhauled the cybersecurity stack end to end and brought it into ISO 27001:2022 alignment. Passed audits with no high-risk findings.
• ▸Saved millions by migrating vendor-locked tooling to open-source equivalents.
• ▸Runs penetration testing against his own production systems. Found things, fixed things, sleeps better.
• ▸Built the IT team from the ground up. Hired, trained, and put process where there was none, then handed real ownership to engineers who now carry large projects on their own name. The department ships at a pace the old team could not have imagined, and it runs at full speed on its own.
• ▸Executed a critical firewall upgrade in a tight overnight maintenance window with zero issues.

He started it as a one-person consultancy after watching too many South African businesses get locked into proprietary software they could not afford. It began as a way to save and modernise companies the way he had already pulled two businesses back from disaster, because that kind of save is the work he is built for. It is now an active engagement house. One small Johannesburg team, one relationship per client, the senior on the keyboard.

• ▸Open-source migration: mapped three hundred-plus proprietary tools to open-source replacements. The public savings calculator at imbertech.co.za lets anyone drop in their own stack and see the exit number, across 300+ apps and 30+ currencies.
• ▸AI automation builds: custom agents, workflow automation, and integration architecture for clients across logistics, advertising, and telecoms. Production systems, shipped and running.
• ▸Security consulting and penetration testing, scoped end to end, with reports written for executives.
• ▸Device forensics for legal proceedings, with a specialisation in iOS forensics. Chain of custody, data recovery, expert analysis.
• ▸vCIO services: executive-level technology strategy without a full-time hire.
• ▸Product line: a private GitHub organisation of twelve repositories, an IT-support suite across backend, client, admin, engineer, and iOS, the Imbertech web systems, and a real-time tracking platform family spanning healthcare and asset-tracking deployments. TypeScript and React across the front ends, React Native on mobile, NestJS and Prisma over PostgreSQL behind them.

His first role owning the full IT stack and the budget. He ran 24/7 IT where downtime meant breached client SLAs, oversaw a team of IT professionals, and modernised so many things it is genuinely hard to list them all.

• ▸Rebuilt the entire server room over a single weekend: new servers, a full virtualisation cutover, and a complete migration of the legacy infrastructure.
• ▸Implemented and maintained the container, virtualisation, and clustered-storage platforms that ran the estate.
• ▸Deployed network monitoring and cut incidents by fifteen percent.
• ▸Managed the full stack end to end: firewalls, switching, wireless, cloud, telephony, databases, web hosting, and security monitoring.
• ▸Ran company-wide training on AI literacy and phishing awareness, keeping a room of non-technical staff engaged with a bag-of-chocolates reward for correct answers.
• ▸Authored and co-signed two formal audit-and-remediation registers documenting the inherited environment and the remediation he drove, each structured as problem, cause, effect, fix, and downtime.

Full MSP work plus fibre rollouts, every tier from L1 to L3, remote and on-site, with after-hours standby. He drove stock around in the morning, installed switches and servers in the afternoon, and terminated cables on weekends. This ran through the Covid lockdowns, where he was placed on the essential-services list so he could keep clients running when most people could not move.

• ▸Sole dedicated resource on a total ransomware compromise. Recovered ninety-eight percent of the data when servers, backups, and snapshots were all encrypted. The company stayed open instead of folding.
• ▸Ran fibre ONT installations across multiple residential developments.
• ▸Built and supported infrastructure for thirty-plus clients across legal, finance, manufacturing, automotive, and education.
• ▸Implemented centralised RMM and reporting for continuous monitoring ahead of failures. Worked across cloud and endpoint-protection platforms.
• ▸Supported large managed client bases across the region.
• ▸Conceived and led IoTManiacs here, an IoT sensor, dashboard, and monitoring venture that grew out of the MSP. It was my idea and baby.

Internal support plus client work across a broad client base managed simultaneously, every tier from L1 to L3.

• ▸Led a corporate email migration to the cloud that improved communication and reduced operational cost.
• ▸Did tender-document work and sat in SITA tender meetings.
• ▸Ran regular security audits, identifying and remediating vulnerabilities.
• ▸Installed hundreds of brackets and screens at a corporate client's offices over a weekend, with a crew he recruited on his own initiative, on Ubuntu's account.

His first role owning whole client relationships end to end, from the first call to the sign-off. Schools, HVAC companies, manufacturing, and anything that could plug in. He did the servers, the networking, the cabling, and the access-point installs himself.

• ▸Designed and managed client networks across enterprise firewall, switching, wireless, and security platforms.
• ▸Still consults for clients from that era years later, including a 2025 emergency RAID recovery routed through an ongoing relationship. The incident is in the Rescues record below.

Internal desktop support for four hundred-plus employees, plus support for Pinnacle and Data Centrix. The IT manager's right hand, and dedicated IT for the executive committee.

• ▸Implemented a new helpdesk system that improved ticket tracking and user satisfaction.
• ▸Led an imaging rollout that automated desktop deployment and enforced configuration uniformity.
• ▸Managed the corporate directory: users, group policy, and security.
• ▸Ran morning generator and inverter-room checks and covered warehouse IT.
• ▸Handled hardware diagnostics and repair at distributor level, across thousands of units.

Internal onsite desktop support for three hundred-plus employees, with Active Directory and GPO administration, user training, and documentation.

• ▸Spent a weekend recabling and relabelling the entire server room.
• ▸Helped contain a ransomware scare before it became a crisis.
• ▸Renovated an open-plan office floor in between.

Walk-in clients, hardware and software diagnosis, and retail sales, from chargers to anti-virus packages. Opened up a PlayStation once or twice.

• ▸Learned to explain complex things to people who do not care about the technical details. He still calls it the most useful skill he has, and it is the origin of the make-complex-simple discipline that runs through everything after.

Deployed and updated virtual-desktop environments across three private hospitals while still in high school. Most people start their IT career after studying. He started his during it.

• ▸Earned a Certificate of Appreciation for the work, at sixteen.

It went back to the school LAN parties he organised, cabled, and sometimes won. GenX turned that instinct into an organisation, founded from nothing. It started on a TeamSpeak server and ended on a national stage. It grew to twenty-one teams and roughly one hundred and forty operators, multi-generational and multi-racial, with departments he stood up for recruitment, team management, marketing, and YouTube production.

• ▸Fielded multiple teams across nearly every major title of the era: League of Legends, Dota 2, CS:GO, Call of Duty, Rocket League, StarCraft, Tekken, Battlefield, and Hearthstone. Competed across DGL (later VS Gaming), MSSA, and ACGL, and played on the Coca-Cola Dome main stage.
• ▸Ran a YouTube channel producing tournament footage and highlights.
• ▸Took back-to-back MSSA South African national titles in League of Legends, in 2016 and 2017, earning National Federation Colours from Mind Sports South Africa both years. The 2017 run, at the 31st MSSA National Championships, put GenX Nightwalkers first and GenX Prominence second.
• ▸The people he recruited and led reached the top of South African esports. He handed whole departments to people he had developed, and several of them ran those functions on their own name. Building teams is harder than building systems, and more rewarding.

IT consulting for real-estate firms while still in school, for Re/Max, Pam Golding, Century 21, and Jawitz.

Volunteer IT at a school for children with special needs. One month that taught me more about patience and perspective than most jobs ever did.

Appeared as an extra in the South African film.