Muggie van Staden, CEO, Obsidian Systems.
Obsidian Systems, South Africa's open source platform partner for more than 30 years, will show enterprise and government delegates how to adopt AI coding agents without giving up control, when it exhibits with Coder at AI Expo Africa 2026. The event runs on 28-29 October at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg.
AI coding agents are moving into the daily work of software teams, often faster than security and compliance teams can respond. Coder's answer is self-hosted infrastructure that lets developers use any model or agent while the organisation keeps governance over what those agents can reach, call and change. Coder's own position is blunt: developers already work inside guardrails, and AI should too.
"South African organisations want the productivity of AI-assisted development, but they cannot send source code and data wherever a tool decides to send it. Coder gives our customers a way to say yes to AI and still answer to their auditors," says Harlee Clark, Account Executive EMEA, Coder.
Obsidian will present the three parts of the Coder platform:
- Coder Workspaces: Standardised, self-hosted development environments where developers and their agents work side by side.
- Coder Agents: A native AI coding agent that works with the model of your choice on infrastructure you control.
- Coder AI Governance: A central gateway to observe and control LLM tool usage, with audit logging and policy control across all AI activity.
The stand will feature a demonstration of the reference architecture Coder first showed with Red Hat at Red Hat Summit 2026 in Atlanta. It runs on Red Hat OpenShift and follows one loop from start to finish: a project manager opens and labels a ticket, a workspace is created automatically, and a Coder agent investigates the issue and opens a merge request. In the reference build, that takes under a minute from click to working agent.
What makes the demo relevant to African buyers is what happens around that loop:
- Every model call passes through Coder's AI gateway, where it is audited and policy-controlled.
- Every workspace's outbound network traffic passes through an agent firewall.
- The same architecture can answer from a sovereign model hosted on the customer's own GPUs through Red Hat AI Inference Server, or from a cloud-hosted model, and the workspace does not need to know which.
- The stack is delivered with operators and GitOps, and the same shape can be deployed on Azure, VMware vSphere, bare metal or air-gapped environments.
That sovereign option speaks directly to one of the event's headline themes. AI Expo Africa 2026 includes Sovereign AI, AI in Security and DevSecOps, and Responsible AI on its programme.
"Our team has run open source platforms for South African enterprises for three decades. Governed AI development is the next layer of that platform, and we want delegates to leave the stand with a concrete architecture, not a slide," says Muggie van Staden, CEO, Obsidian Systems.
Visitors can also request Coder's white paper, The AI Operating Layer, which sets out how organisations can contain data, scope access, govern models, audit activity and control spend as AI becomes part of everyday software development. A download page is available at https://smarter.tech/for/ai-expo-africa-2026/.
Obsidian Systems will be at Stand S9 at AI Expo Africa 2026, Sandton Convention Centre, 28-29 October. To book a demo slot or a private briefing, go to: https://smarter.tech/for/ai-expo-africa-2026.
Coder
Coder provides self-hosted AI development infrastructure that lets developers use any model or agent while giving enterprises the governance and control to scale AI safely. Its platform comprises Coder Workspaces, Coder Agents and Coder AI Governance, and is used by organisations including Dropbox, Palantir, Mercedes and KKR. Coder is SOC 2 Type II certified. Learn more at coder.com.
Obsidian Systems
Obsidian Systems builds and manages the open source platforms, data pipelines and DevSecOps toolchains that enterprise AI depends on, with local support and 30 years of delivery in South Africa. It holds certified partnerships with Red Hat, Atlassian, AWS, Penguin Solutions and SUSE, and is a Level 1 B-BBEE contributor. Learn more at obsidian.co.za.
AI Expo Africa
Now in its ninth year, AI Expo Africa is Africa's largest business-focused AI and intelligent automation trade show and conference. The 2026 edition is in-person only, with a 100-vendor expo, a four-track speaking programme and an expected 3,500+ delegates, over 80% of them decision-makers. Learn more at aiexpoafrica.com.