Following record growth across EMEA, Actifio has added five senior hires to join the team: Chris Hammans (Sales Director, Europe), Mark Crawford (Services Director, EMEA), Steve Jackson (Channel Director, EMEA), Thorsten Eckert (Sales Director DACH) and Simon Chassar (Commercial Director, Europe). The additions to the team collectively bring senior management experience from roles held within VMware and ServiceNow and are now tasked with building on the success Actifio has experienced in EMEA, setting the business up for the next wave of hyper growth and enabling enterprises to virtualise their data based on Actifio’s best-in-class technology.
“A number of developments spur the requirements for data virtualisation solutions in EMEA. The increasing demand for Cloud Services is one vital factor, but also the broad presence of server and network virtualisation ease the acceptance of data virtualisation as the consequent next step”, explains Greg Scorziello, General Manager EMEA, Actifio. “We have selected five senior level business executives from the realm of virtualisation to combine their experience with our technology. Actifio customers will benefit from this expertise to deliver material value and operational efficiency to their companies though data management virtualisation. With the new extended team we will be supplying high quality solutions for enterprise customers and continue our growth in EMEA.”
When Actifio started their operations in EMEA four years ago, their copy data virtualisation solution was predominantly aimed at reducing storage footprint as well as improving data protection and availability. Both use cases continue to remain popular, additional use cases have emerged since. Today, the biggest growth is coming from application development use cases in DevOps scenarios where Actifio is successfully deployed with its data virtualisation competence.
Chris Hammans is responsible for the development of Actifio’s European operations. Prior to Actifio, Chris was instrumental in the success of a number of hyper-growth early stage companies including Citrix, before joining VMware’s as its fifth employee in 2003. In just six and half years Chris built the UK, Ireland & South Africa region employing more than 120 staff, contributing to VMware’s leadership in virtualisation. Most recently, Chris ran Microsoft's Cloud and Datacentre business in the UK, growing the Hyper-V market share to 30.6%.
Mark Crawford brings 22 years of IT management to his role as Services Director for Actifio in EMEA with deep expertise in Application Development, Integration and Cloud. Mark joins Actifio from ServiceNow where he led the Services teams, delivering solutions for a range of Global 500 names across the region. Mark is now responsible for the successful implementation of Actifio's world class Copy Data Virtualisation solutions in EMEA.
Channel Director Steve Jackson brings over 20 years of experience in the IT Industry gained at companies including Compaq and Dell. Steve joined VMware in 2004 and became part of a management team driving dramatic growth and successfully establishing the business across EMEA. Steve is now responsible for developing Actifio’s channel in EMEA.
Thorsten Eckert, Actifio’s latest addition to the team is chartered to drive further growth as the Sales Director for the DACH market. Thorsten also brings a wealth of experience from virtualisation expert, VMware.
Simon Chassar joined VMware in May 2007 at a crucial pre-IPO stage to set up commercial operations and enterprise license business. Simon built the commercial operations strategy to a team delivering over 400 ELA’s. After various progressive roles, Simon operated in sales leadership roles as the Commercial Executive in his final year with VMware, closing the company’s largest project in history.
