Customer engagement vendor Freshworks has announced it has hired former SAP executive Ben Pluznyk as director and country manager for Australia and New Zealand.
The hire comes after one year since launching locally through Synnex, and seven months after hiring Amr Farghali as ANZ channel sales lead.
“Australia and New Zealand have been key markets for us since day one so we’re delighted to be bolstering the local team,” Freshworks ANZ general manager Sreelesh Pillai said.
The last year has been a huge one for Freshworks and as we enter into the next phase of growth, having the right people on board has never been so important.”
Pluznyk joins the vendor after more than eight years at SAP, holding a number of sales roles including ANZ director of cloud platform, database and data management, his most recent role from 2017 to 2020.
Prior to SAP, Pluznyk also worked at Optus, IBM, Outside Edge Australia and Xtralocal in a number of sales and business development roles.
Speaking on his new role, Pluznyk said, "Business software has been consumerised and users want it easy. Legacy SaaS has become too bloated and complicated. Customers and employees are demanding modern, intuitive and easy to use SaaS solutions like Freshworks.”
“There is a huge market opportunity and we've only scratched the surface. It’s an incredibly exciting time to join Freshworks. I’m looking forward to developing deep relationships with customers, partners and the team alike, as well as driving innovation and growth for the ANZ region.”
Freshworks arrived in Australia in October 2020 after signing Synnex Australia as its local distributor. It later hired Amr Farghali as ANZ channel sales lead in May 2021, where he led the development of the local partner program.
Founded in India in 2011, Freshworks’ software-as-a-service platform lets developers, partners and customers to "customise, integrate, and automate business workflows for support, CRM, and IT use cases for businesses.
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