Rackspace has appointed cloud computing pioneer Alan Perkins its director of technology and product for Asia Pacific.
Cloud and web hosting provider Rackspace announced this week it has appointed cloud computing pioneer Alan Perkins its director of technology and product for Asia Pacific.
In his new role, Perkins will lead the adoption and develoption of Rackspace’s solutions in Australia.
Perkins previously served as chief information officer of software company Altium for about seven years. As CIO of Altium, Perkins led the company to adopt software as a service and cloud computing platforms from vendors such as Salesforce.com and Google.
Prior to being appointed to CIO of Altium, he served as an advisory board member for Orion Virtualisation Solutions.
With the adoption of cloud services growing in Australia, Perkins said his appointment came from the need to further drive open cloud innovation in the company.
Perkins’ appointment is well-timed, with the recent launch of Rackspace’s Australian data center and the company’s rapid growth in the region, as the company continues to compete with Amazon Web Services for market share in the APAC market.
“Alan is widely regarded as a visionary. He comes with a huge reputation as a cloud pioneer, with over 20 years’ experience in systems analysis and design,” Rackspace Australian and New Zealand country manager Mark Randall said in a statement. “At a time when cloud and hosting decisions are becoming increasingly important to business, it gives us tremendous confidence to know that we’ve got someone of Alan’s diverse experience, leadership skills, and deep knowledge of technology on board.”
Perkins is recognizzed as a cloud computing pioneer, having been named one of the Top 20 People to Watch 2012 by The Australian, as well as a top 10 finalist for IDC Asia Pacific CIO of the Year.
He has also spoken on deploying major cloud computing initiatives from a CIO perspective at many conferences.
Before his tenure at Altium, Perkins served as managing director of software developer Profound Information, marketing director of Business Manager Software, joint principal at Austsoft.
Talk back: Do you think Perkins will successfully drive Rackspace’s cloud services sales in the Australian region? Are you currently selling cloud services in the Asia Pacific market? Let us know in a comment.
About Justin Lee
Justin Lee has been a staff analyst with theWHIR since 2004. He writes about a range of web hosting and IT-related issues facing the industry on the WHIR website, as well the print version of the WHIR magazine. Follow him on Twitter @Justin_theWHIR.
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Selling cloud services in Asia is really going to be a challenging task. I think people in Asia specially India are still not able to adapt to the cloud technology. There is a huge market for Cloud in India but it will take some time for the people to understand and accept the clod technology.