Africa Outlook: What led you to a career in the technology industry?

Craig Hovey: For me, it has all been about doing what you love. As a teenager my idea of fun was working with computers, and while games accounted for the bulk of the time, I also had this odd passion for hosting services. I would create my own web servers, mail servers, file servers even pretend network users. We did not have internet back then but as internet services arrived it was like opening up the curtains - my closed network fun became globally visible.

I studied Electrical Engineering and then quickly moved into the corporate world, luckily my first job was for an e-commerce focused company trying make the most of the late ninety’s internet boom. When that all literally went boom, I was out of a job and lacking good options. I eventually chose to work at a more traditional corporate company, here we were not serving internet facing users and so my passion was not being fulfilled.

Within three months I moved on due to finding a vacancy at DigiOutsource in the role of WebFarm System Engineer. My role there was to look after the customer facing hosting services - doing exactly what I loved. Through the years, hard work, willingness to take on anything that was thrown at me, ability to self-learn and obsession over the detail saw me move into a leadership role.

Eventually after many years of supporting the IT services at DigiOutsource my role moved over to CIO, and then shortly after a change in corporate structure saw the opportunity to become CTO.