Jamie Scott

As the Chief Technology Officer at Tarsus Distribution, Jamie Scott is the lead technologist in the business and stays on top of current and emerging tech trends.

He studied at Benoni Technical College and Wits Technikon, but his early interest in computers led him to complete a computer engineering course shortly after. That paved the way for his career in technology.

After completing two years of military service, Jamie joined Mohawk Data Systems (MDS) in 1989 as a trainee computer engineer, later advancing to the position of technical support engineer. He gained invaluable experience and a useful skill set during the three years he spent at MDS, including an in-depth understanding of digital and analogue electronics and excellent customer interaction skills.

From MDS, Jamie moved over to Persetel, now BCX. He was with the company for six years, first as a customer engineer, then moving into a sales role and then commercial manager of the Networking and Personal computing division.

In 1997, he joined Tarsus Distribution as an Executive Director, overseeing product managers and new business development, hardware distribution and wholesale sales, end user and channel sales, vendor management, channel development, and marketing.

After almost two decades, he took on the role of General Manager of a Technology business unit at Datacentrix, a company in the Alviva Holdings group, which went on to acquire Tarsus Technology Group in 2021. Following the acquisition, Jamie returned to Tarsus Distribution in his current role as Chief Technology Officer.

He works with the enterprise team to determine which technologies and vendors the company should partner with in the interests of Tarsus Distribution’s highly valued reseller channel. Jamie invests much of his time consolidating and investing in the company’s network portfolio of products as part of a concerted drive to establish Tarsus networking as the number one networking distributor in South Africa.

Among his career highlights he lists seeing Tarsus Distribution grow from a R15 million-a-month business in 1997, to where it is today as the country’s leading value-added technology distributor. Throughout his career, Jamie has won many HP Distributor of the Year awards. He is also proud of the role he has played over the years in hiring and mentoring young people and seeing many of them grow into senior vendor positions in the industry, locally and internationally.

As someone who has witnessed seismic changes in the tech industry, one of the books he has most enjoyed is Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew Grove, founder and former CEO of Intel. Fittingly, his favourite quote is by Nelson Mandela who famously said, “I never lose. I either win or learn.”