Roma Smith

Background

About Roma Smith

With more than 28 years’ experience in the IT industry, 20 of which in executive management positions, Roma has extensive experience in building businesses, setting clear goals and strategies for teams and executing against those goals and strategies to deliver high performance results and deliverables with high performance teams. Roma has successfully built and led high performance teams from sales to delivery in the IT and Consulting fields. While launching and/or representing complex IT vendor products such as Swanlabs, F5, Citrix Netscaler and Lighthammer (later SAP Manufacturing), Riverbed in Africa, Roma built a reputation for excellence in marketing and branding, winning accolades from both her channel partners and vendors. In Oracle and IBM she managed teams of people to sell and deliver complex suites of products and services across Africa, Middle East and Europe. Roma’s diligence and acumen in marketing and branding came to the fore when her business division in EOH launched and represented F5 in Africa and she had to develop and execute an encompassing marketing and branding strategy to help this vendor penetrate different market sectors, key clients and core channel partners. F5 was soon recognised locally as an exclusive brand and adopted by a range of blue chip clients in all the targeted industry sectors. From a delivery point of view, Roma is a disciplined process driven executive that has extensive experience across a range of organizational disciplines with her key strengths veering towards operational, sales, channel, delivery and technical management of a business. Having represented global products across EMEA, Roma gained extensive experience in building local businesses and business networks to represent global vendors. Her expertise encompassed logistics, distribution, channel management, partner programs as well as the management and execution of sales strategies across various regions and countries. Roma was key to sign some of the largest distribution partners in Africa ie Westcon, Tarsus, Axis Workgroup, as well as some of the biggest IT firms in Africa as channel partners ie. Dell (Global) Dimension Data (Global), EOH, BCX, Datacentrix, Three6Five, Bytes Technology etc. Roma and the businesses she managed have won various international awards for leadership, entrepreneurship and achievement. Roma has extensive experience in representing global brands and in building strong brand recognition and brand loyalty with her customer and resellers.