The ICT industry is mourning the loss of Malcolm Siegel, who was co-founder and director of Routed, a South African neutral cloud infrastructure provider.
Siegel passed away on 14 October, two months after being diagnosed with a highly aggressive form of colorectal cancer.
He succumbed to the illness five days after his 40th birthday.
As founding director of Routed, Siegel had responsibility, on a technical level, for connectivity and security, and he was also in charge of Routed’s customer service division.
Headquartered in Johannesburg, with cloud locations in Johannesburg and Cape Town, Routed provides an integrated cloud platform, addressing enterprise cloud, recovery and modern application development requirements.
The company’s self-service products are targeted at managed service providers and ISPs/telcos that want full control of infrastructure they can white-label, package and sell-on with their value-added service offerings.
According to Routed, Siegel was hailed as a driving force in setting the tone for the business – as a professional, determined and committed company leader. He played an instrumental role in bringing the initial anchor tenants to Routed VMware Cloud platform through his close industry contacts.
“We are overwhelmed and truly thankful for all the messages of support and condolence that we have received since his passing,” says Andrew Cruise, MD of Routed.
“Malcolm Siegel was firstly my friend – although many could say that he was everyone’s friend! He was also my business partner and colleague. He touched so many communities and his passing will leave a void in so many lives. He was much loved. We wish his family and friends a long life and may his soul rest in peace."
Siegel is survived by his wife Nadia, and two children Carmiya (11) and Eliel (8), as well as his mother Isobel, and sisters Tamara and Kim.
Heartfelt tributes from his friends, family and business associates continue to pour in on his Facebook profile.
In 2017, Siegel was appointed director at the Internet Service Providers' Association, the recognised industry body for ISPs in Southern Africa.
At the time of his appointment, he had been a long-serving member and occasional chairman of the INX-ZA Management Committee, responsible for operating local community-run Internet peering and exchange points. INX-ZA operates the only completely neutral and community-run Internet exchange points in SA.
He was a fixture at industry forums and conventions, giving seminars, hosting keynote presentations as MC and contributing to INX-ZA and the smooth running of the events.
“Malcolm was a highly-certified and experienced networking engineer, having previously designed and built local ISP RSAWEB’s fibre Internet backbone, with additional responsibility as manager of the network department. Malcolm was also certified in IT security and layered this into his work at Routed as well as his previous employments,” adds Cruise.
Prior to joining RSAWEB, Siegel worked for tech firms E Cash Systems and BTA Limited.
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