Business recovery solutions specialist Unitrends announced it has tapped former McAfee head Kevin Weiss to serve as president and CEO of the company.
The Weiss appointment is the latest in a series of senior management team positions the company has announced over the last several months.
In the fourth quarter of 2014, Unitrends announced Brad Miller as its new chief financial officer.
“My sweet spot is enabling fast-growing companies to evolve into sustainable industry leaders. Unitrends has the exact mix of qualities I look for in a company: passionate professionals, extremely satisfied customers, very strong technology and a compelling vision for the future,” Weiss told eWeek. “I bring to the table extensive experience in setting corporate strategy, expanding channel operations, and implementing the operational controls required to support that strategy. When you combine these competencies with Unitrends’ inherent strengths, there is no question in my mind that we will become the next behemoth in the disaster recovery market.”
In 2014, Unitrends released a number of new products, including its hybrid cloud Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Recovery Assurance offerings, as well as Boomerang, its VMware-to-Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud migration, cloudbursting and DRaaS tool.
The company also completed two acquisitions (PHD Virtual and Yuruware) and moved its headquarters from Columbia, South Carolina, to Burlington, Massachusetts.
Prior to joining Unitrends, Weiss was the chairman and CEO of Xhibit Corp, the parent company of SkyMall. Prior to that, he served as the president and chief executive of Author Solutions, a Penguin Random House Company, and played a role in the sale of the company to Pearson.
Author Solutions was a portfolio company of private equity firm Bertram Capital, where Weiss has served as an operating partner since 2007.
“We’re just starting to expand internationally, and I’m excited about the opportunity to grow our infrastructure outside of the U.S. We need to do it with more speed and triple digit growth rates. Another huge opportunity for us is the channel,” Weiss said. “We plan to invest heavily in the channel – from recruiting new partners, to educating and training our current channel partners. We also plan to invest in training opportunities for employees. Lastly, we see plenty of potential to enhance our brand recognition, and plan to invest in marketing campaigns to support this effort.”
Prior to Author Solutions, Weiss was the president of McAfee, now part of Intel Security.
Weiss has also held senior management positions at Ariba, BindView and BMC Software and spent more than 15 years in various sales and marketing positions at IBM.
“I think the cloud is changing everything — but not necessarily in ways people think,” he explained. “Some vendors treat the cloud as another place to store stuff. We see the cloud as being truly transformational, where it is now economically feasible for any company of any size to replicate both their data and IT infrastructure in the cloud as a de facto “hot standby” that can be instantiated on a moment’s notice should some or all IT systems fail. This trend is only emerging today, but it is going to change how the world thinks about disaster recovery forever.”