One of the first things you notice about professor Derek Keats is his impatience. He’s impatient with national initiatives that he says have failed to move out of the ‘talk shop’ and into ‘developing sensible infrastructure’; he’s impatient with the way people treat open source software as an untrustworthy third cousin of proprietary models, and he’s impatient with being a mere user of technology developed elsewhere. This makes him the perfect candidate for pioneering private cloud computing at Wits as the new deputy vice chancellor of Knowledge and Information Management.

To his knowledge, this is the first enterprise implementation of cloud technologies at a South African university. He believes that bringing together computing resources in this way will enable digital preservation and archiving services previously unavailable to the university, as well as being able to better support academic research initiatives.