Serisha passionately advocates for technology and its pivotal role in the success of businesses.
With a knack for numbers, strategy and innovation, TechSoft International CFO and executive director Serisha Beosumbar is also a sports car enthusiast – making her full throttle approach to her career quite fitting.
Much like the powerful revs of an engine, her dynamic career and the innovative solutions offered at TechSoft are built for performance.
Flourishing in a male-dominated industry, including serving as a board member and a member of the executive team, Serisha’s career at TechSoft continues to soar. TechSoft is the exclusive African territory partner for TIBCO Software, a global leader for integration and analytics, offering an array of digital competencies to accelerate businesses through connected intelligence.
Serisha believes technology is becoming increasingly necessary for the success of businesses: “It will be core to their survival. It is about how quickly businesses can embrace technology to drive their operations and ensure their success. IOT, AI, cloud computing and connected intelligence in general are going to become critical for businesses,” she says.
She relishes being in the IT industry where various systems can be used to enhance reporting and profiling and where intelligence is used to run scenarios. “It is about empowering businesses to make real-time decisions to help them grow and prosper,” she says. But her conquering heading up finance for the software giant would be no surprise to her younger self. Having had an affinity for accounting and numbers since her school days, her foray into crunching numbers for a living was a logical step.
While studying in KZN, she initially thought that she’d go the traditional accounting route but she changed tack once other modules broadened her horizons. “I realised that I liked the application and the interpretation of financials more than the compilations thereof. I think that such information is critical for businesses and decision-making and this informed my path into managerial accounting. It was something nice and different,” she explains.
Her career progressed quickly from her initial start as a project accountant in 2010 to management to her current role, something she attributes to having spent considerable time learning in each department, “I am so grateful, it allows me to apply my skills to real life instances of how people work and enables me to add value,” she says.
She is currently focused on getting a new strategic entity up and running from a new deal completed in June. “We concluded an agreement with IFS, which is an international software company. The entity that we will be running is called Technodyn International and we will be promoting and selling all of the IFS software. We have exclusive rights in the whole of Southern Africa,” she explains.
Serisha is feeling really energised about what the group is bringing to the market and the continent at large: “It was unheard of for local entities to engage with OEMs. Now we are a 100% South African-owned entity with the ability to resell this software. It is good for us and for the economy in general,” she says.
The landscape has changed dramatically during the pandemic and they are constantly looking for better ways to do business and innovate, “With the onset of Covid-19, cash management becomes critical and a core part of my daily financial management. We have a close-knit exco team and we work together – so sometimes I would help with sales and someone else helps with pricing or putting proposals together. No single day is the same, which is exciting,” she explains.
The pandemic has also presented many opportunities and it is about leveraging them. “We have many solutions and options available. We look forward to helping businesses while also keeping up with the demand, the market, the changes and all the new technologies coming up. We are excited about the broad prospects and the potential for IT in South Africa and the rest of Africa,” she says.
Many businesses have grown as a result of their solutions. One of their recent projects has been assisting one of the largest telecom operators in Kenya to digitise their manual processes. The team has been working with them remotely and they are in the process of implementation.
Serisha has also noted that female interest in the sector is on the rise, especially seen through the higher volumes of women applying for specific positions. While the industry continues to skew towards men, there has been vast improvement. “We uplift and upskill our workforce. We try to motivate the females in our entity to grow into leadership roles,” she says. She also believes that strong leadership is what is going to ensure that businesses survive, especially in this climate.
