There is a change of leadership at Google Cloud, with Niral Patel being appointed as regional director for Sub-Saharan Africa.

The company explains that Patel will be based in Johannesburg and will be responsible for leading Google Cloud’s business across Sub-Saharan Africa region.

“He will have overall responsibility for the company’s sales strategy and continued development of its go-to-market sales operations. Niral will be focused on supporting the growth and scale of Google Cloud customers across a variety of industries,” notes a press release sent to Hypertext.

For those familiar with the local tech landscape, Patel is no stranger to leadership roles at some of the top tech firms operating in the country. He has more than 20 years of tech sales experience joins Google Cloud from Oracle, where he was MD for South Africa. Prior to this Patel held various roles at Microsoft, IBM and Hitachi.

“We have been seeing strong customer momentum in Africa, and companies ranging from digital natives to large corporations are coming to us to help them digitally transform and reinvent their business models,” notes Abdul Rahman Al Thehaiban, MD for Turkey, Middle East and Africa at Google Cloud regarding the appointment.

“We are thrilled to have Niral join us as we accelerate the next stage of growth with our local teams, partners and customers. He brings a wealth of experience to the Google Cloud family,” the MD adds.

With Google Cloud aiming to be one of the key cloud players in SA and across the Sub-Saharan region, it will be interesting to see how Patel helps the company achieve this goal.