Acronis hires new Australian boss

Acronis has announced Tony Drewitt as its general manager for Australia and New Zealand.

Based in Sydney, Drewitt will be responsible for sales, marketing and business development activities and will report to Steve Goh, Acronis' vice president of sales for Asia-Pacific and emerging markets

"I see great potential for Acronis solutions in the region. Australia and New Zealand are advanced markets and cloud technology has already been embraced here by businesses of all sizes, because of its availability, cost effectiveness and flexibility. Acronis brings the much-needed data protection layer to these users whose data is increasingly spread across hybrid cloud IT environments and onto mobile devices," said Drewitt.

Drewitt replaces Lincoln Goldsmith who left the data protection vendor in January to take on a regional role at Cisco Meraki.

Drewitt started his career as a broker in 1989 for MW Marshall London. In 1999, he co-founded wireless company Wireless Logic in the UK. He then went to British Telecom before moving to Australia to work for Vodafone in 2003. Since then, Drewitt has worked for IBM, Juniper Networks, Symantec and Veritas.

Prior to joining Acronis, Drewitt ran the Asia-Pacific global alliances and service provider channel business at Veritas.

"Businesses in the ANZ region need to re-evaluate their data protection strategies to make sure they are safe – there’s no time to waste. With Tony’s deep knowledge of our target customer needs, extensive experience in channel management, and a true understanding of the value of cloud services and solutions, Tony will bring a great value to Acronis and the local market," said Goh.

Acronis aims to triple the size of the local team in the next five years.

In April, Acronis selected Rhipe to distribute the vendor's suite of cloud backup and recovery, DR, file sync and share solutions.

Acronis has registered 30 percent business growth in Australia and New Zealand in 2015. The company had 20 percent of its worldwide revenue from cloud alone.