Technology leadership · ICT operations · Business management
Johann Alexander Botha
More than 20 years in South African ICT, across technical operations, enterprise sales, general management and running my own companies. I build and run technology from the network and servers up to the product, and I report on it to boards.
Profile
I founded and ran Bioniq ISP for ten years and sold it, together with the hosting company Biohost, in 2025. I was CFO of the craft brand Notcha until its sale in 2026. As CIO of Carrus Information Technology until May 2026, I designed and ran the AWS platform behind its fleet management product.
Through GenusCore I now build and operate a private cloud and several live SaaS products. Earlier, I led a 41-person business through a merger as General Manager and managed eight national sales executives at NGA Africa. I am based in Paarl, Western Cape, and speak English and Afrikaans.
How I work
I begin with the operational and commercial requirements, then work through architecture, cost, delivery and support. I use automation where it reduces repetitive work and keep monitoring, documentation and review around production systems. I work directly with implementation teams while communicating progress, risk and financial implications to clients and executives.
Experience
Founder and Managing Director
GenusCore
- Lead a portfolio of SaaS products built and hosted in-house (see below).
- Built the company's private cloud: a Proxmox cluster on HPE ProLiant servers with Ceph and ZFS storage and GPU compute.
- Run production across the private cloud and Oracle Cloud; for Sintamo, PostgreSQL replication and failover are tested in both directions.
- Set up container-based delivery with GitHub Actions and zero-downtime blue/green releases, plus Prometheus and Grafana monitoring.
- Created appFactory, a delivery method where AI coding agents build from committed specifications, issues and pull requests, with CI and review at each step.
Chief Technology Officer
Greysense Group
- Set technology strategy and budgets across the group's portfolio companies.
Chief Information Officer and Director
Carrus Information Technology
- Designed and ran the AWS platform for a fuel management and telematics product: 57 CloudFormation stacks, 19 Lambda functions and 12 ECS services.
- Brought infrastructure cost in about 89% below a comparable market benchmark.
- Built the IT governance framework and the company's GenAI operating model, and reported to the board on performance, risk and compliance.
Chief Financial Officer
Notcha (sold September 2026)
- Budgeting, forecasting, cash flow and financial reporting for a national craft brand.
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Bioniq ISP and Biohost (sold together in 2025)
- Built an internet service provider from scratch on MikroTik, Ubiquiti and Splynx, and a hosting company on cPanel, Plesk and WHMCS.
- Automated more than 90% of day-to-day operations, which cut the operations team to a single role.
General Manager
Cura Digital Manufacturing
- Ran the combined 41-person business after its merger with CellSecure, with full P&L responsibility and board reporting.
Product and Sales Manager
Intervid
- Managed the IT-based security product range and led the national sales team.
Midmarket and WSM Sales Manager
NGA Africa (Business Connexion joint venture)
- Managed eight sales executives nationally, with contracts, budgets and bi-weekly EXCO reporting.
Sales Executive
Business Connexion
- Part of the team that launched the company's CCTV department, and managed its enterprise accounts.
Earlier career (2001 – 2010)
| Aug 2009 – Apr 2010 | Multivid · IT Support and Commissioning |
| Jul 2008 – Aug 2009 | Secuscan Security Systems · Project, Marketing and Business Relationship Manager |
| Aug 2006 – Jul 2008 | Retail Business Intelligence · Sales Executive in a team selling more than R17 million a year |
| Jul 2004 – Aug 2006 | Secuscan Security Systems · Project Manager |
| Jan 2004 – Jul 2004 | Unisys · Call Centre Team Leader |
| Jan 2001 – Jan 2004 | Cura Digital Manufacturing · Commissioning Engineer |
Products & projects
Opsanity.ai
Multi-tenant, mobile-first platform for operational execution, compliance, workforce management and time and attendance.
ROEP.online
Proactive AI IT support that detects and diagnoses issues before users report them, with policy-controlled remediation.
Sintamo.com
CV and candidate platform, running on two sites with replicated data and tested failover.
Thermal
Thermal system monitoring and maintenance, used by paying clients.
Retail video audit and edge AI
A .NET 9 Blazor rebuild of a retail loss-prevention audit system used by supermarkets in South Africa and Namibia, plus the design of a companion GPU appliance for AI review of point-of-sale video.
Carrus FuelSense
Greenfield AWS architecture with event-driven IoT pipelines for vehicle telematics, at about 89% below market cost.
Research & development
Distributed LLM inference
Inference across several machines, including mixture-of-experts models, with LAN and WAN tests. One multi-node run matched all 96 reference output tokens.
NAR, in R&D
A "network video recorder for radio" that tracks presence, movement, falls and vital signs with WiFi, radar, BLE and Zigbee instead of cameras.
GPU optimisation engine
A combinatorial optimisation engine of about 20,000 lines of C, CUDA and Python, tested on industrial graphs of up to 19.9 million edges.
Computational mathematics
Independent numerical work using Arb/FLINT ball arithmetic, and synthetic experiments on success criteria for quantum gravity research. Code is published; the work is unrefereed.
Skills
Cloud
AWS, Oracle Cloud, Cloudflare, Terraform
Private cloud
Proxmox VE, Ceph, ZFS, KVM, VMware, HPE ProLiant
Networking
MikroTik, Cisco, Arista, Ubiquiti, WireGuard, segmentation
Delivery
Docker, GitHub Actions, Traefik, blue/green releases
Development
.NET and C#, Python, TypeScript, Angular, Flutter, C/C++, CUDA
Data and monitoring
PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MQTT, Prometheus, Grafana, Zabbix
Business systems
Odoo ERP, Stripe, Azure DevOps, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Splynx
Leadership
P&L, board reporting, vendor and SLA management, change management
Education & certifications
- Matric (2000), Middelburg Hoër
- Diploma in C Programming, Alison
- Visual Basic .NET Programming, National Computer College
- Sales Management, Stratham Bryce International
- Milestone Professional, BICSI
- AXIS Certification, AXIS Academy
- SANS 10139 fire detection system design
- PSIRA Grades C, D, E