I'm Colin Pinkham
Technology & Product Leader | CIO | COO
- Address Cape Town, South Africa
- E-mail cp "at" colinpinkham dot com
- Use email address above to contact me.
Extensive business technology, IT leadership, consulting and transformational expertise.
Experienced, commercially driven, Technology and Product Strategy Consultant and division leader, with 20+ years of success in adding value via IT in B2B, B2C, internet, ISPs, MSPs, managed services, SMEs & global corporate markets.
Acts as a ‘trusted partner’ to the business, bridging the gap between technology & wider business needs.
Detail oriented & financially aware, aligns technology with strategic business goals. Brings well-honed skills in vendor & contract negotiations, managing OPEX & CAPEX spend, ensuring value for money IT.
Passionate about delivering success via innovation, with a commercial focus to building networks and systems, designing products and setting strategies. Highly-experienced as a Product Strategy Consultant.
Experienced across telecommunications, ISP networks, FinTech software and e-commerce areas.
People-focused & inspiring as a Business Leader, empowering high-performing IT, technical & product teams, leveraging an encouraging and positive leadership style to integrate agile IT teams with end users.
Successful in delivering the transformation of technology provision, promoting a user-centric approach, effectively communicating the strategic vision and promoting technology as a business asset, not just a cost.
Achievements include being instrumental in founding the first commercial ISP in South Africa, growing the business to value of $150m by 2014, building a network across 23 locations, in addition to establishing product development teams, and more recently undertaking due-diligence for VCs / Private Equity investors.
Professional Skills
Skills and Experience
Leadership
Agile Teams | Technology | Product | Operations
Have always had an interest in Agile teams, long before I knew it had a name. My focus has always been on allowing the smartest people be creative and help them with direction and strategy. This has mostly been technology teams but the principle applies everywhere.
Product
Conception to Inception to Lifecycle management
Formulate plans and business cases to develop new ideas into products and build teams around the development and future management of those products.
Cloud
Strategies | Migrations
Were mainframes a form of Cloud Computing? That was my first experience in EDS. From distributed computing back to Cloud, it has always been about making the best use of available technologies to focus the business on what it's core business should be. Cloud forms part of any technology strategy.
Financial
P&L | Budgeting | Planning
Experienced in managing commercials for business units, including forecasting, budgeting, costing, pricing, capital and capacity planning.
Strategy
Technology | Commercial
From network strategy in a start up through to M&A strategies in a multi-national, I've combined natural instincts with learnings through experience to work as a strategic advisor on multiple major projects.
Vendors
Sourcing | Negotiating | Managing
More than 25 years in developing relationships with vendors to create the best options for businesses to use. This includes locating, researching, negotiating, contracting and managing the whole vendor process.
Work Experience
Strategize and execute Cloud migrations. Help to build Agile teams as well as conducting negotiations with vendors to aid team and business growth. Oversee product development and management, as well as the overall strategies for business cases and vendors. Administer lifecycle management, commercial business planning and business process engineering. Act as consultant COO | CIO.
AWS Alliance Lead - responsible for setting up and managing the partner relationship and general vendor management.
Head of Operations managing all field engineering and support functions, supporting over 3000 Wi-Fi network points across the country.
Main focus was on Wi-Fi Product development, including business case planning for a commercial launch for a mobile telecommunications provider and including VoIP handoff research.
The end of a 20 year journey. MTN bought Verizon Business SA to create MTN Business.
Key role as Chief Information Officer responsible for all IT and IS teams within MTN Business.
Other roles included costings and capital planning, technology advisor for M&A activities.
Part of the executive team of Verizon Business South Africa.
Functional reporting into local MD as well as EMEA VP.
Overall responsibility for all costing and pricing decision making and business case planning, as well as capital planning for the business.
Head of Information Systems teams, including Developers, Server Operations, Business Analysts, Network Systems.
Served on the board of UUNET Africa and SDN Mauritius. Included Kenya, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana and overall strategy and direction.
Part of the executive team of UUNET SA.
Built the Product Development and Product Management functions of the business.
Started costing methodologies and capacity planning templates and processes and forecasting for budgets.
Oversaw technology direction and product direction.
The beginning of a 20 year journey.
Key Roles:
- Network Engineer
- Systems Administrator
- Customer support
- Network Manager / NOC Manager
Towards the end of 1993, the first commercial ISP in South Africa was launched (TICSA - The Internetworking Company of Southern Africa). The main founder and MD was my brother Chris who co-opted me to take over the technical components of running the network and systems. As the business grew this led to me becoming the Network Manager having grown the network to 23 locations and staff from the 4 of us to over 180.
My first job in the technology industry in between starting and finishing my BSc. Working in the EDS European Information Management Centre in London monitoring and maintaining systems and networks.
Education
Master of Business Administration (MBA)
Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
Courses and Certifications
References
Colin is one of the brightest minds I've ever worked with, who has exposure to both the extremes of technical and commercial environments. Colin has insight into the industry and environment that he operates in with the added value of commercial application of technical possibilities.
Khetan Gajjar Executive Head: Fixed and Mobile at VodacomI was privileged to be able to work for and with Colin. Every team Colin leads becomes enthusiastic and inspired, consistently. Every team Colin lead in the fifteen years I worked at the same company achieved spectacular things which I’m convinced they would not have achieved without the value he brings. Colin is valuable asset for his formidable technical, financial and other business skills, but leadership skills like his are rare
Andre Venter Senior Product ManagerI loved being a part of the Verizon Business team and Colin was certainly one of the reasons. I learnt an enourmous amount about global networks and services whilst employed at Verizon and Colin was always the person I could approach to get answers to my big and burning questions. He has an incredible amount of knowledge and experience; and what made it so valuable to me and I'm sure to many others still, is his willingness to share it. Even as an Executive, his door was always open and I took the opportunity on many occassions to take a seat in it and rack his brain in the quest to learn more. This added to his other great attributes, such as honesty, personal integrity, strong ethics and a good sense of humour have I'm sure contributed significantly to his success and will no doubt continue to do so.
Sean Young Director at Rosen BridgeEvery opportunity I have had to work and collaborate with Colin has been extremely rewarding - Colin understands the ICT industry back-to-front, has an acute sense of intuition when it comes to strategy and level of integrity is admirable.
Daryn Smith Chief Sales and Innovation Officer at Huble"... His ability to compliment his technical skills with his commercial skills is good and there are few in the market that could offer that combination with such depth and quality."
David Meintjies CEO at Telviva (Pty) Ltd"One of the best managers I’ve ever had. And I’m not easy to manage.
But you asked the pointy questions when they needed to be asked but the rest of the time trusted us enough to make the decisions and get on with it. We had the freedom to make the decision, right or wrong, and deal with the consequences. Never once was it a fear response, the only “fear” we had was in disappointing you. The consequence of that in turn was that we had amazing teams that accomplished a lot."Renier Rhode Technical Lead, Rain South Africa
Any Statistics
Years in technology
Always learning
Years Growing
the Internet industry
kilobits per second
Average Internet speed in SA in 1994.
Megabits per second
Average Internet speed in SA in 2020.
Percent
Global Internet Penetration
Percent
Mobile Internet Penetration
My Interests
Father of 5 kids, including identical twin girls, there’s not much time for other interests. My main exercise interest has been CrossFit, having qualified as a Level 1 Trainer and judge, as well as running, mainly at half-marathon distances.
- CrossFit
- Watch Movies
- Animals
- Shopping
- Food & Restaurants
- Travel
- Running
FAQ with toggle section
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Contact Me
Feel free to contact me
- Address Noordhoek, Cape Town, South Africa