After an intensive contest hosted by Digicloud Africa, Google Cloud’s primary enablement and distribution partner in Africa, Synthesis Software Technology, which positions itself as a leader in emerging technology and AI, emerged as the winner, adding the Google Cloud Professional Security Operations Engineer (PSOE) certification to its over 200 certifications.
Synthesis had two engineers place in the top 10 out of 50+ participants, with Marcin Wójcik, Senior Software Engineer/Cloud Engineer at Synthesis, winning the challenge overall.
The six-week SecOps challenge saw numerous partners striving to achieve the PSOE certification, which previously only one person in Africa – a Digicloud Africa team member – held. Ultimately, Synthesis won the challenge.
The Google PSOE encompasses threat hunting, detection engineering and incident response using Google Cloud security tools like Google Security Operations (SecOps), Security Command Center (SCC) and Google Threat Intelligence (GTI).
For Synthesis, the achievement strengthens its ability to secure cloud and hybrid environments for its customers in highly regulated industries.
Wójcik says: “Organisations have become more digitally connected and more invested in AI, and with that comes a higher exposure to threats. Security is no longer just a concern for IT – it is a top priority for the businesses themselves. I took this journey because there are not many certified security professionals in the Google Cloud space to assist customers in securing their environments.”
He notes: “Google’s security solution not only covers the Google Cloud Platform, it also covers your on-premises solutions as well as other cloud environments. By utilising their solutions and becoming proficient with monitoring, detecting and responding to active threats through the provided tools integrated with external tools, we have gained the ability to improve the end-to-end security posture with enhanced visibility of current threats and the ability to respond faster to any incidents that may happen. In addition, Google uses Gemini and other AI tools to assist with identifying these threats. We use Google SecOps tooling to pick up active threats very quickly, triage them, and, based on their severity, we can action them either using their tools and the automated playbooks and get a resolution very, very quickly. This allows us to provide secure solutions for our clients and help customers improve their security posture, respond faster to incidents and support their compliance obligations.”
Paul Spagnoletti, Revenue Executive at Synthesis, says the latest achievement aligns with the company’s commitment to staying abreast of change in the market: “Security is a high agenda item for us from a competency, skills and certification perspective. New risks emerge every day and the threats are continually evolving, so as a systems integrator, it's critical for us to be abreast of those.”
Dean Maier, Head of Cloud at Synthesis, notes: “Synthesis partners with several technology businesses and we have an incentive scheme to encourage our team members to continually upskill themselves and achieve more certifications.
“For strong engineers with a software, cloud or data background, we believe progressing from architecture into security is a natural next step to build their all-round competencies,” Maier says.
The Synthesis team boasts over 200 certifications, including 53 in Google Cloud, two Google Cloud Professional Cloud Security Engineer certifications, and the new Google PSOE certification. Synthesis is also Google Workspace credentialed with eight Google Workspace certifications.
Spagnoletti says Synthesis primarily focuses on the South African enterprise market, supporting industries such as financial services, retail, gaming, FMCG, consumer packaged goods and logistics, with top customers including some of the big four banks and the University of Cambridge.
“We ultimately help organisations move across their digital transformation journey, whether that entails cloud migration or cloud engineering to enable them to leverage deeper data toolsets or use AI to transform their business. We also have core software engineering capabilities to build and customise solutions to meet specific needs, and a managed services capability in which we run environments on behalf of customers. Security and SecOps are key in all our operations,” he says.
Tjaard Du Plessis, Executive – Professional Services at Synthesis, adds: “Our main focus is emerging, complicated and high-stakes projects. These complex, high-impact projects are usually focused on modernisation, growth or scaling out.”
This capability strengthens Synthesis’ ability to help customers detect, investigate and respond to security threats across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments, while supporting broader transformation programmes across cloud, data, AI, software engineering and managed services.
Maier says: “We are seeing growing customer interest in Google Cloud, particularly where organisations want to accelerate AI adoption through Gemini and enterprise-ready data, security and cloud capabilities."
“Our PSOE certification further demonstrates Synthesis’ commitment to Google and our Google customers, and comes on top of other significant achievements like winning the annual Google Cloud AI Partner BlueSprint Challenge in 2024 and being recognised as the Digicloud Rising Star of the Year for 2025,” Spagnoletti concludes.
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