Technology executive and founder

Johann Alexander Botha

I help businesses build, operate and scale technology, from cloud infrastructure and software products to teams, budgets and day-to-day operations. Over 25 years in South African ICT I have founded and sold companies, served as CIO and CFO, and still design and run production systems myself. I report technology performance, risk and investment priorities to boards.

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25+years in ICT, since 2001

41people led as General Manager

3business sales: founded and sold Bioniq and Biohost; CFO of Notcha through its sale

~89%below vendor and consultant quotes to set up the Carrus AWS platform

Profile

I founded and ran Bioniq ISP for ten years and sold it, together with the hosting company Biohost, in 2025. I was CFO of the craft brand Notcha until its sale in 2026. As CIO of Carrus Information Technology until May 2026, I designed and ran the AWS platform behind its fleet management product.

Through GenusCore I now build and operate a private cloud and a portfolio of SaaS products. Earlier, I led a 41-person business through a merger as General Manager and managed eight national sales executives at NGA Africa. I am based in Paarl, Western Cape, and speak English and Afrikaans.

How I work

I begin with the operational and commercial requirements, then work through architecture, cost, delivery and support. I use automation where it reduces repetitive work and keep monitoring, documentation and review around production systems. I work directly with implementation teams while communicating progress, risk and financial implications to clients and executives.

Selected achievements

Carrus Information Technology · CIO and Director · 2023 – 2026

An AWS platform for fuel management and telematics, at a fraction of the quoted cost

Challenge: Carrus needed a cloud platform to take in live data from fuel and vehicle-tracking devices and turn it into a product its clients could rely on, without infrastructure costs eating the margin.
What I did: I owned the technology platform end to end. I designed the event-driven architecture on AWS: 57 CloudFormation stacks, 19 Lambda functions and 12 ECS services, deployed with Terraform. Device data from MiX Telematics and Teltonika equipment arrives over MQTT and API gateways. I also set the development standards, monitoring, security and AI governance, and reported to the board.
Result: The platform was delivered and run in production at about 89% below the vendor and consultant quotes Carrus had received to set it up.

Bioniq ISP and Biohost · Founder · 2015 – 2025

Building an internet provider and a hosting company that almost run themselves

Challenge: Start an internet service provider part-time in 2015, alongside a full-time job, and grow it without a large operations team.
What I did: I built the network on MikroTik and Ubiquiti and ran billing, provisioning and authentication on Splynx with custom integrations. Alongside it I founded Biohost (shared hosting, virtual servers, domains and managed services on cPanel, Plesk and WHMCS). I handled operations, suppliers, finance and the upstream contracts.
Result: More than 90% of day-to-day operations were automated, so operations needed a single role. Both businesses were sold together as a going concern in 2025.

GenusCore · Founder · 2017 – present

OPSanity: from idea to a live product on infrastructure I run

Challenge: Businesses with staff spread across many sites struggle to prove that checklists, corrective tasks and shifts actually happen, especially where connectivity is poor.
What I did: Through GenusCore I lead the product and run its whole stack: a multi-tenant, offline-first mobile app, the backend and the private cloud it runs on (Proxmox, Ceph and ZFS on HPE ProLiant servers), with automated testing, blue/green releases and Prometheus and Grafana monitoring.
Result: OPSanity is live with customers and available on Google Play. The same platform and delivery pipeline now host GenusCore's other products.

opsanity.ai →

Experience

2017 – Present

Founder and Managing Director · Founder and CEO

GenusCore (Pty) Ltd, South Africa · GenusCore, Inc., Delaware (since January 2026)

Lead a software, ICT and AI consulting business that also builds and hosts its own SaaS products (see Products).
Built the company's private cloud: a Proxmox cluster on HPE ProLiant servers with Ceph and ZFS storage and GPU compute.
Run production across the private cloud and Oracle Cloud; for Sintamo, PostgreSQL replication and failover are tested in both directions.
Set up container-based delivery with GitHub Actions and zero-downtime blue/green releases, plus Prometheus and Grafana monitoring.
Created appFactory, a delivery method where AI coding agents build from committed specifications, issues and pull requests, with CI and review at each step.

Jul 2022 – Present

Chief Technology Officer

Greysense Group

Set technology strategy and budgets across the group's portfolio companies.

Jan 2023 – May 2026

Chief Information Officer and Director

Carrus Information Technology

Designed and ran the AWS platform for a fuel management and telematics product: 57 CloudFormation stacks, 19 Lambda functions and 12 ECS services.
Delivered the platform at about 89% below the vendor and consultant quotes to set it up.
Built the IT governance framework and the company's GenAI operating model, and reported to the board on performance, risk and compliance.

Nov 2021 – Sep 2026

Chief Financial Officer

Notcha (sold September 2026)

Budgeting, forecasting, cash flow and financial reporting for a national craft brand.

Aug 2015 – 2025

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Bioniq ISP and Biohost (sold together in 2025)

Built an internet service provider from scratch on MikroTik, Ubiquiti and Splynx, and a hosting company on cPanel, Plesk and WHMCS.
Automated more than 90% of day-to-day operations, which cut the operations team to a single role.

Aug 2016 – Apr 2017

General Manager

Cura Digital Manufacturing

Ran the combined 41-person business after its merger with CellSecure, with full P&L responsibility and board reporting.

Aug 2015 – Jul 2016

Product and Sales Manager

Intervid

Managed the IT-based security product range and led the national sales team.

Aug 2013 – Aug 2015

Midmarket and WSM Sales Manager

NGA Africa (Business Connexion joint venture)

Managed eight sales executives nationally, with contracts, budgets and bi-weekly EXCO reporting.

May 2010 – Jul 2013

Sales Executive

Business Connexion

Part of the team that launched the company's CCTV department, and managed its enterprise accounts.

Earlier career (2001 – 2010)

Aug 2009 – Apr 2010	Multivid (Jasco Group) · IT Support and Commissioning
Jul 2008 – Aug 2009	Secuscan Security Systems · Project, Marketing and Business Relationship Manager
Aug 2006 – Jul 2008	Retail Business Intelligence · Sales Executive in a team selling more than R17 million a year
Jul 2004 – Aug 2006	Secuscan Security Systems · Project Manager
Jan 2004 – Jul 2004	Unisys · Call Centre Team Leader
Jan 2001 – Jan 2004	Cura Digital Manufacturing · Commissioning Engineer

Products

Products I have built through GenusCore. The label on each shows its status today.

Live

OPSanity.ai

Mobile-first platform for operational execution: checklists with photo evidence, corrective tasks, workflows with sign-off, time and attendance, and AI reporting. Works offline. Android app on Google Play.

opsanity.ai →Google Play

Early access

ROEP.online

Proactive AI IT support. An agent on each device spots problems, investigates the real cause and fixes them under policies you set, with a human in control of disruptive changes.

roep.online →

Live

ShrinkGuard.ai

Retail loss prevention with AI. Vision and sensor fusion flags suspicious behaviour in store as it happens and turns it into clear playbooks for store teams.

shrinkguard.ai →

Early access

Sintamo.com

Career profiles for South African skilled trades, classified against all 1,511 OFO occupations, with credential verification and OFO-matched job listings. Built on two sites with database failover tested in both directions.

sintamo.com →

Early access

GenusCore.com

Game servers, virtual machines and business hosting from South Africa, on a private Proxmox and Ceph cloud with GPU compute. Customer portal app on Google Play.

genuscore.com →Google Play

Other projects

SaaS · Live

Thermal

Thermal system monitoring and maintenance, used by paying clients.

Google Play

Client project

Retail video audit and edge AI

A .NET 9 Blazor rebuild of a retail loss-prevention audit system used by supermarkets in South Africa and Namibia, plus the design of a companion GPU appliance for AI review of point-of-sale video.

Architecture

Carrus FuelSense

Greenfield AWS architecture with event-driven IoT pipelines for vehicle telematics. See Selected achievements.

Skills

Leadership and architecture

Technology strategy, P&L and budgets, board reporting, IT governance and GenAI policy, cloud and platform architecture, vendor and SLA management, mergers and integration

Hands-on, in production today

AWS, Oracle Cloud and Cloudflare; Proxmox, Ceph and ZFS on HPE ProLiant; MikroTik, Cisco and Arista networking; Docker, GitHub Actions and Traefik; PostgreSQL; Prometheus and Grafana; Odoo ERP

Working familiarity

.NET and C#, Python, TypeScript, Angular, Flutter, C/C++ and CUDA; Terraform; VMware; SQL Server; Azure DevOps

Research & development

Independent experiments and development work. None of it has been peer reviewed.

Open source · AI-assisted · Unrefereed

Computer-checked mathematics on the Riemann zeta function

Using AI coding tools and exact interval arithmetic, I produced a computer-checked result about one technical condition studied in research related to the Riemann hypothesis. It does not prove or bring closer the Riemann hypothesis itself.

The computation uses Arb/FLINT ball arithmetic to show that the lowest eigenvalue of Weil's quadratic form for the Riemann zeta function is simple, with an even eigenfunction, for every window half-width L in (0, 1.19]. That is one hypothesis in the Connes–van Suijlekom programme. Code, certificate data and the write-up are public under the MIT licence.

Code, data and paper on GitHub →

Experiment

Distributed LLM inference

Running large language models, including mixture-of-experts models, across several machines over LAN and WAN. In one multi-node test, the output matched the reference output on all 96 tokens.

In development

NAR

A "network video recorder for radio": camera-free sensing of presence, movement, falls and vital signs with WiFi, radar, BLE and Zigbee.

Development work

GPU optimisation engine

A combinatorial optimisation engine of about 20,000 lines of C, CUDA and Python, benchmarked on industrial graphs of up to 19.9 million edges.

Experiment

Quantum gravity success criteria

Synthetic experiments on how candidate theories of quantum gravity could be tested against agreed success criteria.

Education & certifications

Matric (2000), Middelburg Hoër
Diploma in C Programming, Alison
Visual Basic .NET Programming, National Computer College
Sales Management, Stratham Bryce International
Milestone Professional, BICSI
AXIS Certification, AXIS Academy
SANS 10139 fire detection system design
PSIRA Grades C, D, E