HASMUKH Gajjar says the question he is asked most often is how a medical doctor ends up in the information technology industry.

His move from the one world to the other was more a product of circumstance than design.

Gajjar was born in Uitenhage, but moved to Cape Town in 1971 to study medicine at UCT. He completed his studies in 1977 and then spent four years in hospital practice, at Somerset, Livingstone and Groote Schuur. He left in 1983 to go into private practice in Athlone and by the end of 1988, decided to specialise in radiology.

"In the meantime I had set up a small software company together with one of my patients. I had a buyer for my practice in January 1989 but my specialisation stint at the hospital was only coming up in August, so I decided to help my friend in the business in the interim."

This decision set him on the IT path.

Gajjar soon secured the local agency for WordPerfect. In January 1992, he was appointed managing director of WordPerfect SA which he ran until August 1994 when it was bought by Novell of the US. Gajjar became the marketing director of Novell in SA. But when Novell resold WordPerfect, Gajjar and some of his colleagues decided to go on their own and launched a black owned and managed IT company Zimele Technologies in April 1996.

Gajjar had been involved in black empowerment in the IT industry and helped in the formation of the Black Information Technology Forum in the Western Cape, which he chairs. The decision by some BITF members to merge saw the formation, in March, of systems integration group Ndizani.

His moves did not go unnoticed by cellphone group Vodacom, which announced this week Gajjar's appointment as group non-executive chairman following the departure of Alwyn Martin to Siemens.

While his position is non-executive, he will be involved in many aspects of the group. "Obviously I would want to build on the success of Vodacom. There is a rapid merging together of telecommunications and IT - what I call voice and data. We are moving towards a global economy, and SA needs to bring people into the information economy. We need universal access and this will require great investment in infrastructure.

"I am coming in at a stage where Vodacom has already invested tremendous amounts in infrastructure and has been successful commercially. Now it is a question of building on that success so it is a profitable and engaging organisation."

Gajjar expects to spend a lot of time initially understanding the environment, the organisation and the technologies which are involved.

He is most impressed with the fact that Vodacom has very successfully applied leading-edge technology in a developing world. "We (in SA) have digital TV as opposed to cable, and GSM phones rather than fixed lines. These indicate there are ways of applying the right leading-edge technologies to Africa rather than trying to apply ageing technologies."

Gajjar is, in his own words, "a techno freak". He loves gadgets and is totally familiar with his computer, networks and the Internet. In fact he often puts many of his engineers to shame with the depth of his technological know-how.

"This is probably what attracted me to radiology, which is a very technical speciality."

Gajjar is married and has a daughter, 9, and two sons (19 and 20) who are both following in his footsteps. One is studying business science with an IT major while the other is studying medicine.

In his spare time he loves watching movies and listening to music and has recently taken up golf - luckily, as this is a sport Vodacom supports.

He is relieved to reveal he has always been a Vodacom subscriber.

Marcia Klein

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