SAS Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, Pakistan and Turkey Executive Information

Riad Gydien is currently the Vice President Middle East and Africa for SAS Institute charged with managing future strategies and ensuring the alignment and centralisation of resources throughout the region.

Joining SAS as country manager for South Africa in 2007, he was later promoted to head of operations for Africa and the Middle East alongside his role of country manager in 2008.

With his appointment as Vice President MEA in 2009 he then added Pakistan and Turkey to his territory, and is now actively involved in achieving better cohesion between offices, sharing of intellectual property to better serve customers, and management guidance at an operational level for the territory.

Gydien has spent most of his career working within the Business Intelligence industry, and has extensive knowledge of how analytics can improve the operations of a business. Prior to joining SAS South Africa in 2007, Gydien held senior positions at South African based Fios and Sekunjalo, on top of serving a tenure in Saudi Arabia as head of Sales and Marketing at Thimar Al Jazirah.

Maphumuzana Nxumalo, Country Manager - South Africa

Edward Sungura, Regional Director - Sub-Saharan Africa
Tasked with the oversight, management and development of the sub-Saharan region, Edward works tirelessly with his team and partners to build a better understanding of SAS and business analytics in the countries in which it operates. With more than ten years experience at SAS he has an intimate knowledge of each aspect of the customer lifecycle as well as an excellent understanding of the diverse needs of the various cultures on the African continent.

Edward also boasts intrinsic knowledge of hardware, software, sales and management, and a talent for building relationships between companies, clients and partners throughout the African continent. His goal is to further grow the market share of SAS throughout Africa – something he has to date consistently achieved on, uncover the reality that business analytics is not a nice to have in the region but rather a must have, as well as ensure his customer have the tools to make better business decisions based on fact.

Shukri Dabaghi, General Manager - Middle East

Mazhar Hussain, Country Manager - Pakistan

Gökhan Nalbantoglu, Country Manager - Turkey