Cobus van der Merwe is a former army man who has managed to carve out an impressive second career in defence technology. He’s an experienced negotiation team leader in both partnership establishment and contract closure in land warfare and aviation systems. He is currently a senior executive specialising in electronic warfare at Saab Grintek Defense, based in Centurion, South Africa.
Cobus has extensive experience in leading defence-level operational test and evaluation teams and performing customer value engineering. In this conversation, taped a couple of months ago, Cobus shares insights gleaned from an extensive defence career which straddled the seismic shifts which occurred within South Africa’s socio-economic landscape over the last three or four decades.
Theme music by Brian Lupiya. Used with permission.
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Cobus van der Merwe is a former army man who has managed to carve out an impressive second career in defence technology. He’s an experienced negotiation team leader in both partnership establishment and contract closure in land warfare and aviation systems. He is currently a senior executive specialising in electronic warfare at Saab Grintek Defense, based in Centurion, South Africa.
Cobus has extensive experience in leading defence-level operational test and evaluation teams and performing customer value engineering. In this conversation, taped a couple of months ago, Cobus shares insights gleaned from an extensive defence career which straddled the seismic shifts which occurred within South Africa’s socio-economic landscape over the last three or four decades.
Theme music by Brian Lupiya. Used with permission.
By his own admission, Matthew Lee would not have been voted most likely to become an executive at a leading software multi-national by his classmates at the trade school where he trained to be a plumber.
Years after he first left plumbing to try his hand at networking, Matthew worked his way up the corporate ladder at Comztek and Novell. While based in Johannesburg, he now oversees African operations at the German open source software firm, SUSE.
Among many other things, Matthew chats to Andile Masuku about how the open source software movement has cleaned up its act, the extent of OSS adoption on the continent, and why Microsoft might no longer be considered the global OSS community's arch nemesis.
Music Credits:
All music by Brian Lupiya. Used with permission.
African Tech Conversations
Cobus van der Merwe is a former army man who has managed to carve out an impressive second career in defence technology. He’s an experienced negotiation team leader in both partnership establishment and contract closure in land warfare and aviation systems. He is currently a senior executive specialising in electronic warfare at Saab Grintek Defense, based in Centurion, South Africa.
Cobus has extensive experience in leading defence-level operational test and evaluation teams and performing customer value engineering. In this conversation, taped a couple of months ago, Cobus shares insights gleaned from an extensive defence career which straddled the seismic shifts which occurred within South Africa’s socio-economic landscape over the last three or four decades.
Theme music by Brian Lupiya. Used with permission.
