Industrial software company AVEVA is increasing its focus in Africa, with South Africa set to be the main benefactor of increased investment and jobs, and the springboard for the company’s plans for the rest of the region.

This was highlighted by AVEVA Africa VP Khaled Salah, who, in an interview with Engineering News on the sidelines of AVEVA Day South Africa 2026, in Johannesburg, on April 22, pointed out that the company would increase the size of all of its departments, ranging from sales to marketing and the technical team, in South Africa, as it aimed to get closer to its customers.

Moreover, the company would also be expanding its channel partners, who provided another route to market, he said.

This increased focus in the region is reflected in the company in January opting to separate its Middle East and Africa market into two separate entities.

“We did that because we do believe that there’s a lot of opportunities in Africa, in terms of people, talent and investment from outside . . . We want to capitalise on such opportunities,” Salah acclaimed.

He pointed out that South Africa boasts the requisite talents to support this, with a diverse workforce and many multinational companies operating in the country. Moreover, there is a high level of digital awareness, with considerable digital appetite from customers, which is not prevalent in many other countries, Salah averred.

Risks to these endeavours include rising geopolitical tensions, which is causing volatility and impacting supply chains.

Salah highlighted that AVEVA could play an integral role in helping customers increase productivity and reduce power consumption – with these being the two most prominent requests received by the company.

He also said now was the time to start scaling up AI use cases in the country and region.

“This is the next frontier I see for South Africa. A lot of customers have good use cases, but in small assets, departments, processes. Now is the time to scale,” he stressed.

Salah highlighted AVEVA Connect as an important solution for the goals alluded to. Connect is the company’s open, cloud-native industrial intelligence platform.

It allows data from assets to be unified, sent to the cloud, analysed and returned with actionable insights.

Visibility on assets provides insights into their energy consumption, which enables decision-making on whether these need to be replaced or optimised.

Salah informed that the company was working with customers in South Africa across three verticals of metals and mining, power and energy, to encourage an uptake of AVEVA Connect, and assist them with choosing relevant use cases.

“We see a very good appetite, because it’s very intuitive, easy to work with. . . We are working closely with customers on some use cases and to expand those use cases across facilities in South Africa and across Africa," he said.

Salah highlighted the company’s understanding of the industrial use case as a major differentiator, providing it with a competitive edge. “We understand the slight details in every use case in the operation, and this distinguishes us from competitors,” he averred.

He also mentioned that all of the company’s products were vendor-agnostic, enabling them to work with any customer and integrate with any vendor – “there are no limitations”.

The products were also intuitive and easy to integrate, negating the need for extensive training, Salah said.

“The industry overall is at a very exciting moment. We have a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that we need a lot of energy, collectively as humanity, for people, and for AI and for innovation. And the opportunity is that we can save a lot of energy from existing equipment, which is not efficient,” Salah commented.

He highlighted that by using AVEVA’s technology, customers could realise energy savings of 10% to 20%, and this energy could be redirected to technology or people for a good price.