Four Hires at Axcient

Axcient, Inc. announced the appointment of four new hires to its management team:

• Ken Sims as VP 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.

Together, the four bring decades of experience in building and leading teams at technology companies.

"Data protection is a multi-billion dollar industry that has not been disrupted in decades. Having the right management team in place is critical to executing on our vision to forever change the way people store, protect and access their data, applications and systems," said Justin Moore, CEO of Axcient. "Adding Ken, Joe, Ann and Joan’s tremendous sales and marketing expertise to our team allows us to continue to grow aggressively while staying laser-focused on our mission to replace antiquated backup, business continuity, archiving and disaster recovery technologies."

Prior to joining Axcient, Ken Sims was the VP of Sales at Dell KACE where he built and oversaw a global sales team of 170 product specialists that grew revenue 450% in just two years. Previously, he served as VP of Sales and Business Development at KACE where he established partnerships with Gateway, CDW and Dell. The success of the Dell relationship led to Dell’s acquisition of KACE in February of 2010. Sims has also served as VP of Marketing and Business Development for Oblix, which was acquired by Oracle.

Joe Schwartz comes to Axcient from Cisco Systems where he led digital marketing and demand generation within Cisco’s Collaboration Software Group. As senior director, Marketing, Schwartz was responsible for the WebEx team’s global web sites, ecommerce, demand generation, and various strategic initiatives. Prior to Cisco’s acquisition of WebEx, Schwartz was VP of Marketing Operations and Segment Marketing and played a key role in WebEx’s growth from $40M to $480M in annual revenue. Prior to WebEx, Joe helped quadruple revenue at Calico Commerce.

Also from Cisco, Ann Neir brings an extensive background in international sales operations strategy and management, as well as in building high performing teams to drive deal acceleration and revenue growth. Prior to Axcient, she was senior manager of WW Sales, Strategy & Planning for Cisco, where she helped build and operate the go-to-market plan for accelerating growth of Cisco’s cloud services. Neir also served as Cisco’s Manager of Global Sales Operations and helped achieve a two-year, 220% growth in deal management. Previously, she advised senior executives on global network and technology vendor agreements at Sprint/Nextel.

Joan Morales joins Axcient with a decade of experience in channel sales, marketing and product management in the U.S. and European markets. As VP of Global Channel Development and Strategy for Hewlett-Packard, he established the company’s first European lead program and grew it to $600 million in its first year. In his prior position with HP as Product Manager, EMEA, he managed HP’s all-in-one printers and scanners through three years of growth. Previously, he was the brand manager for B2B Software, Peripheral and Accessories at Dell, EMEA in Madrid.