The back story of: Grant Marais
I have spent the last three decades selling technology across some of the world's most demanding markets — living and working in Kampala, Mozambique, Dubai, Johannesburg, and London, and spending a great deal of time in the countries that surround each of them. If there was a frontier market opening up, a new network being switched on, or a technology company trying to figure out how to move product through a continent, there's a reasonable chance I was somewhere nearby with a whiteboard and an overdue flight to catch.
This blog exists because I have things to say about all of it — about selling, about strategy, about the technology industry's peculiar habit of celebrating disruption until it disrupts you. But before I get into any of that, I thought it was worth telling you who I actually am. So here goes.
Where It Started — Running a Business
Before I ever carried a vendor quota, I ran one. My first serious role in the technology world was as a shareholder and senior leader in EAS Africa, a mid-sized business operating in the African market. Running a business — with skin in the game, not just a salary at stake — teaches you things about commercial reality that no corporate training programme ever will. Payroll, margin, client retention, the consequences of a bad quarter: these are not abstract concepts when you own part of the outcome. That foundation shaped everything that came after it.
Kampala Calling — How Grant Marais built Simba Telecom Uganda
In late 2003, I moved to Uganda to join Simba Telecom as Chief Commercial Officer. It was, in every meaningful sense, a founder-level commercial brief. I owned the business plan up to the gross revenue line — demand forecasting, predictive modelling, market segmentation, product and promotional planning, financial feasibility of new products and services, and due diligence across marketing, sales and distribution. If the revenue number was right or wrong, that was on me.
Simba was a young business competing in a market that was still defining itself, and building brand equity from a standing start in that environment requires a very particular kind of commercial thinking. You are simultaneously the strategist, the analyst, the channel architect, and — more often than anyone tells you in the job description — the internal evangelist, making sure the people inside the business believe in what they are selling as much as the market is supposed to.
The defining achievement of my time at Simba was building and launching a structured channel programme for 4,000 sub-dealers — backed by an ERP system I implemented — that monitored performance, introduced tiered rebates and rewards, and was specifically engineered to build loyalty and reduce churn. Four thousand partners. One coherent commercial architecture.
By 2005, Simba had built a formidable reputation as Uganda's leading MTN airtime seller. But the achievement I'm perhaps most proud of from that period is one that came out of a different kind of conversation entirely. I initiated and personally negotiated Nokia distribution rights for Simba — securing official distributor status for Uganda at a time when Nokia was the dominant global handset brand and that designation was genuinely hard to come by.
Official distributor status meant direct access to Nokia's product pipeline, full marketing support, and a level of brand trust that smaller, unofficial resellers simply couldn't match. For Ugandan consumers buying a Nokia handset, Simba Telecom became a guarantee of authenticity. For Simba as a business, it opened doors that would have taken years to reach otherwise. And for me, it created a working relationship with Nokia that — not coincidentally — led directly to my next chapter.
That experience — building a distribution ecosystem from the ground up, aligning incentives across a large and diverse partner base, using data infrastructure to manage it at scale, and then negotiating with a global brand from a position of demonstrated performance — became one of the most transferable things I carried into every role that followed. Nokia didn't recruit me in spite of what I'd built at Simba. They recruited me because of it.
Africa First — Grant Marais at Nokia and the Mobile Revolution
I joined Nokia in 2005 as General Manager for Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean Islands, based in Mozambique. And when I say I joined Nokia there, I mean that almost literally — because Nokia's operating presence in that territory didn't yet exist. Before I could sell anything, I had to build the organisation from the ground up: legal entity establishment, premises, fit-out, and recruiting an entire team. The infrastructure that would eventually deliver those commercial results was constructed from nothing.
These were markets where the mobile phone wasn't a convenience — it was the first telephone many people had ever owned. The network operators were expanding at extraordinary speed, and the commercial infrastructure to support them — the dealer channels, the retail partnerships, the last-mile distribution — was being built in real time. My job was to build Nokia's piece of it, from a standing start, in a market where the rules were still being written.
What I learned in Southern Africa — about scaling an operating organisation in a fragmented, high-growth environment — became a template I would return to again and again. You can't parachute in a Western playbook and expect it to work. You have to understand the terrain before you can build anything that lasts.
During my time in Mozambique, Nokia's brand preference in the territory moved from 58% to 92%. The number was so extraordinary that Finland HQ dispatched a covert audit team to verify it. They did. It was real.
In 2009, Nokia expanded my remit dramatically. I relocated to Dubai to take on the role of General Manager for Pan MEA and Eurasia — a territory that stretched from the Middle East and Africa all the way into the Commonwealth of Independent States. The scale was of a different order entirely: multiple time zones, multiple regulatory frameworks, multiple languages, and a product line that was simultaneously at peak global dominance and quietly approaching a cliff edge that almost no one inside the company could see clearly.
One of the defining achievements of that Dubai chapter was opening Ethiopia for Nokia — a market the company had never been able to crack despite years of trying. Getting a foothold there required a very different kind of commercial and relationship-building effort to anything I'd done before, and it remains one of the things I'm most proud of from that period.
I left Nokia in 2012. In the years since, I've written and spoken extensively about that period — not to settle scores, but because Nokia's story is one of the most instructive case studies in modern business. A company can be spectacularly right about hardware and catastrophically wrong about software ecosystems at the same time. Legacy dominance is not a moat. I treat those years as a cautionary tale, and I'd encourage anyone in a leadership position to do the same.
Space, Satellites, and Fresh Eyes — Grant Marais at Intelsat
In January 2013, I joined Intelsat as Regional Vice President of Africa Sales. The role came with an unusual brief: the satellite industry, despite dealing in genuinely space-age infrastructure, had accumulated decades of institutional inertia. Tenure was long, thinking was entrenched, and the commercial model — point-to-point connectivity, sold much as it always had been — was overdue for a rethink. I was brought in precisely because I had no prior preconceptions about how the industry was supposed to work.
The assignment was to help shift Intelsat from a provider of point-to-point connectivity into a solutions-oriented organisation — one that could articulate the value of its infrastructure in terms that enterprise customers and mobile operators actually cared about, rather than in the technical language of transponders and orbital slots.
Commercially, I leveraged the MNO relationships I'd built at Nokia, positioning satellite capacity not as competition to terrestrial networks but as a backhaul tool — the thing that lets a mobile operator extend 3G and 4G coverage into rural areas that fibre will never reach. I also worked extensively on Intelsat's next-generation high-throughput satellite fleet, EpicNG, framing its capacity around real demand signals: rural broadband, Africa's transition from analogue to digital television, and the enterprise verticals — banking, mining, oil and gas — that needed always-on connectivity regardless of where on the continent they operated.
The deal I'm most proud of from that period, though, was a bluebird — the kind of commercial opportunity that only lands when you've been looking at the market from an angle nobody else inside the industry is looking from.
The deal I'm most proud of was a full Ku-band payload with MultiChoice — a commitment of an entire satellite payload that then had to be built and launched. I identified the underlying business risk: MultiChoice had no spare in-orbit capacity at the correct orbital location, meaning a satellite failure would have been potentially existential for their broadcast operation and deeply damaging to Naspers' market value. At the time, MultiChoice was Naspers' primary cash-generating asset. Once I'd exposed the strategic exposure, I assembled and led a cross-functional global team across Intelsat's commercial, technical, and engineering functions to develop the proposition and close it. This wasn't a straightforward sales process — it required bringing together the right people across multiple disciplines and geographies to make the case and then deliver it. The result wasn't just commercially significant for Intelsat. It was a piece of strategic risk management for one of Africa's most consequential media businesses.
I departed Intelsat in mid-2015. It had been two and a half years of work I'm genuinely proud of — and a useful reminder that sometimes the most valuable thing you can bring to an industry is the willingness to look at it without the weight of its own history.
The Wi-Fi Bet — Grant Marais as CEO of VAST Networks
By 2015, something interesting was happening in South Africa. The price of deploying Wi-Fi infrastructure was falling off a cliff, and the "Wi-Fi first" philosophy — the idea that you could build a carrier-grade broadband network on unlicensed spectrum — was moving from fringe concept to serious commercial proposition. Dimension Data and MultiChoice saw it. They formed a joint venture, combined the Wi-Fi assets of Internet Solutions and Mweb, and came looking for someone to run it.
That company was WirelessCo, which we later launched publicly as VAST Networks. I became CEO. The mandate was bold: build Africa's first truly open-access Wi-Fi network — a shared infrastructure platform that any mobile operator or ISP could run their services on, rather than a walled garden owned by a single carrier.
What people sometimes miss about VAST is that despite having wealthy owners in Dimension Data and MultiChoice, it was a start-up in every meaningful sense. Yes, we inherited people and a deployed network — but that was it. No back office. No office at all, initially. No OSS or BSS. No product definitions. No ERP. No systems of any kind. The business had to be built from scratch while simultaneously being expected to operate commercially.
The network situation was equally complex. We'd inherited two entirely different technical architectures from the merging entities and made an early decision not to patch them together but to build something new and right: a centralised core network with full geographic redundancy, layer 2 aggregation with centralised control at the edge, and a complete OSS/BSS implementation built from the ground up. That is not a small undertaking for a business that didn't yet have a filing cabinet. Leading through that — while simultaneously building the commercial organisation and taking the product to market — was the most operationally demanding period of my career.
What followed commercially was one of the most exciting chapters I've been part of. We built the underlying network that powered guest Wi-Fi for Starbucks, McDonald's, and KFC across South Africa. We signed a roaming agreement with AT&T — the first of its kind in the region — that let millions of American travellers seamlessly offload onto our network. And we built out significant infrastructure in townships like Diepsloot, Alexandra, and Katlehong, giving nearly a million residents access to high-speed broadband for the first time.
We also built LoXion, an in-house analytics platform that gave venue operators visibility into user behaviour and the ability to build loyalty programmes on top of their Wi-Fi infrastructure — turning connectivity from a cost line into a business tool.
The macro headwinds, when they came, were significant. The #DataMustFall movement accelerated a brutal mobile price war, LTE bundles got dramatically cheaper, and the commercial rationale for third-party Wi-Fi offload became more complicated to argue. What I will say is this: the infrastructure we built had real, demonstrable value — a substantial last-metre connectivity footprint that served both enterprise and consumer markets at scale. That kind of asset tends to attract attention. VAST's story didn't end in the way we'd originally envisioned, but the network itself proved its worth in ways that outlasted the original business model.
Moving to the UK — Grant Marais at Cisco and the European Technology Landscape
After VAST, I made a deliberate decision to relocate to the United Kingdom in 2020 and move into the global technology market. I joined Cisco — initially in the Meraki division, focused on cloud-managed networking — but my remit quickly extended beyond the enterprise. A significant part of my focus was the service provider channel: selling to UK service providers directly, and building out the managed services model through them.
One of the achievements I'm most proud of from that period is tripling the volume of launched managed services through the UK's primary service provider partner. That kind of growth doesn't happen through product pitches — it requires deep understanding of a partner's own commercial model, their sales motion, and where your technology genuinely fits into what they're trying to sell. It's a different discipline to direct enterprise selling, and one I found genuinely energising.
In 2021, I was named a Cisco Chairman's Club winner for FY21 — a distinction reserved for the top 1% of Cisco's global salesforce. Not a bad way to announce yourself to a new continent.
Where Grant Marais Is Now — World Wide Technology
I currently lead one of the highest-performing sales teams at World Wide Technology (WWT), one of the world's leading technology solution integrators, focused on multi-national Media and Gaming as well as Service Provider accounts across the UK, and broader European markets. The win rate speaks for itself — but what I find more interesting than the numbers is the nature of what we're actually helping customers do.
WWT is a different kind of technology company. It's not a vendor with a product to push — it's an integrator that lives or dies by its ability to understand a client's actual problem and assemble the right combination of technology and expertise to solve it. Right now, that means helping our customer base implement what is shaping up to be Europe's largest horizontal cloud — a programme of real strategic consequence. And it means doing more than just the technical implementation: we're helping customers navigate the commercial landmines that come with legacy infrastructure, actively working with them to migrate away from ageing virtual machine models onto container and Kubernetes architectures before those legacy commitments become a much more expensive problem to solve.
For someone who has spent their career building things from scratch in markets where the rules were still being written, it's a genuinely good fit.
I also hold an MBA, completed alongside an active working career — which gave me the frameworks to understand why some of the things I'd done instinctively actually worked, and a few that didn't.
Why This Blog Exists
I started Gromy's World because I had accumulated a career's worth of opinions about technology, sales strategy, market disruption, and leadership — and I was tired of keeping them in my head. The blog is where I think out loud. Sometimes it's a post-mortem on a company (Nokia, as you might have noticed, comes up a lot). Sometimes it's a take on AI, on platform selling, on what good sales leadership actually looks like versus what it's often described as.
I don't write to build a personal brand in the influencer sense of the phrase. I write because the ideas are worth examining, and because the best way to test whether you actually understand something is to explain it to someone who wasn't there.
If any of that sounds like your kind of thing, stick around.
