Axcient Bolsters Team With Cisco, HP, Dell Kace Executives

By Scott Campbell, CRN 5:14 PM EST Tue. Dec. 18, 2012

Cloud storage provider Axcient has beefed up its management team with the addition of four new executives.

The hires will help Axcient reach the next level of business as the company breaks out of its startup mode, said CEO Justin Moore, who was named one of CRN's Top 25 Disruptors of 2012.

"We're at that stage where it's time to take the company to the next level. We have a great team in place that has taken us this far. We're looking to next-level leadership to continue that growth curve," Moore said.

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Data protection is an industry that has not been "disrupted in decades," Moore said, and having a strong management team is necessary to change the way people store, protect and access their data. Axcient expects to triple its 2011 revenue by the end of the year and has grown nearly 2,500 percent in three years, Moore said.

"We want to double [revenue] again in 2013. The numbers are getting large now, which points to the caliber of people we are able to attract," Moore said.

Joining Axcient are Ken Sims as vice president of business development, Joe Schwartz as senior director of demand generation and direct marketing, Ann Neir as director of sales operations and Joan Morales as director of channel marketing.

Sims comes to Mountain View, Calif.-based Axcient from Dell Kace, where he was vice president of sales in charge of a global sales team of 170. Schwartz and Neir join Axcient from Cisco, where Schwartz was senior direct of marketing for Cisco's Collaboration Software Group and Neir was senior manager of worldwide sales, strategy and planning. Morales joins Axcient from Hewlett-Packard, where he was manager of global channel development and strategy.

"We're adding [Schwartz], who ran WebEx from $45 million to almost $500 million. That's a huge hire. Sims ran worldwide sales [for Kace] from $2 million through the Dell acquisition and continued to run it to $100 million plus in two years. [Neir] is an exceptionally bright and ambitious woman who restructured the entire Cisco cloud sales group and [Morales] has deep channel strategy expertise," Moore said.

The hires bolster Axcient's business and operations team, just a few months after the company brought in Asim Razzaq as vice president of engineering to beef up the technical team and Eric Weiss as vice president of marketing.

"We just came back from our offsite planning meeting and this puts us well on track to be one of the most disruptive companies in the market," Moore said.

PUBLISHED DEC. 18, 2012