Ajay is currently Head of Operations at SANReN since 1 April 2014. He is primarily responsible for business operations, financial management, programme management of strategic projects, business process and procedure development and operationalising the strategic objectives and goals of SANReN derived from the three-year cycle business plan. He provides strategic, tactical and operational support to the SANReN Director and the SANReN team. His skills and experience positions him to be a specialist generalist which allows him to excel in his current Operations role. He plays a key role in integrating the business operations, network engineering, technical operations and service delivery activities in order to effect SANReN’s strategic objectives and goals. His role also extends to the effectiveness and efficiency improvements of all areas of business operations. He also drives the marketing and communications efforts to grow the awareness of the South African NREN and build and maintain relationships with its various stakeholders. Previous to joining the SANReN team, he was a senior project manager with the CSIR Meraka Institute (now the CSIR Next Generation Enterprises and Institutions cluster). He has a total of 20 years project management experience. He has experience in managing multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder, multi-year and multi-country projects which have focused primarily in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for development (ICT4D) domain before he joined SANReN. He has managed projects across the value chain from research to development; first proto-typing to production and manufacturing; to large-scale roll-out and implementation including operational set-up.