Axcient Appoints Tim Sheahen As Head Of Sales, New Channel Chief

‘The first few months of this year have been already record breaking months for us. But I want to make sure that we‘re continuing to expand into our distribution channels as well, apart from our partnership with Pax8 where our business doubled in 2022. I want to carry that momentum to look for partnerships who can expand our reach,’ says Tim Sheahen, Axcient’s new senior vice president of global sales and channel chief.

Data protection technology developer Axcient on Monday appointed Tim Sheahen as its new senior vice president of global sales and channel chief.

Sheahen in 2020 joined Axcient as vice president of sales from Webroot, where he most recently served as senior director of sales at Webroot’s Carbonite business. In his new role at Axcient, he is replacing Charlie Tomeo, Axcient’s former chief revenue officer who in February joined Tampa, Fla.-based Rewst as chief revenue officer.

Axcient saw tremendous growth in 2022, with some months hitting record revenue, and Sheahen told CRN that his first priority is to carry that momentum into 2023.

[Related: ‘Backups Are Dead,’ CEO Of Backup Vendor Axcient Says]

“The first few months of this year have been already record breaking months for us,” he said. “But I want to make sure that we‘re continuing to expand into our distribution channels as well, apart from our partnership with Pax8 where our business doubled in 2022. I want to carry that momentum to look for partnerships who can expand our reach.”

Driving that growth at Axcient is the company’s goal to provide business continuity and disaster recovery functionally at an intriguing cost to its MSPs, Sheahen said.

“As end users are looking to save a buck, they‘re looking to tighten things up,” he said. “And MSPs are looking for vendors that can provide solutions that can cover all the use cases. And one thing that Axcient does very well is, we can provide one solution that covers a lot of these use cases, but at a fraction of the cost. Our focus is on simplicity. We want to make sure MSPs can backup and recover data very simply without having to go through a lot of effort while reducing operational costs.”

Sheahen is also charged with bringing more MSPs into the Axcient ecosystem. He said the company has recently doubled its marketing budget to better reach MSPs, and is also looking to expand its distribution channels beyond its long-term Pax8 relationship, including a new relationship with Ft. Meyers, Fla.-based RMM provider Atera.

For 2023, on the technology side, Axcient is focused on limiting partner downtime, Sheahen said.

“If someone needs to recover their data, something has gone wrong,” he said. “Sometimes it’s horribly wrong. So our goal in 2023 is to really reduce the downtime that our MSPs partners are experiencing. One of the things that we’re focused on is incremental failback. I guess the best analogy you can use for that is trying to change a car‘s tires while the car’s in motion. So reducing the downtime from hours and days down to minutes is a big focus.”

Another way to decrease MSP downtime is making sure that Axcient continues to round out its offerings to be a single provider for various use cases, Sheahen said. To that end, the company is in early access for its new data protection for Linux environments, and will go into general available in the near future, he said.

Axcient is looking at other additions to its technology, including its auto verify feature to make sure backups are bootable and not corrupt, as well as adding automatic disaster recovery testing, he said.

All in all, it is a very exciting time for Axcient, Sheahen said.

“We have some pretty fast growth going on, and we can carry that momentum into 2023,” he said. “We‘re going to continue to round out our solutions. And we’re going to continue to focus on the security aspect, expanding the old backup rule of three-two-one, or three copies of data, two stored locally and one off-site, to three-two-one-one, where that last one is an immutable copy.”

Roddy Bergeron, chief information security officer at Enterprise Data Concepts, a New Orleans, La.-based MSP, told CRN that he’s known Sheahen for a couple of years, and said the promotion couldn’t have happened to a better person.

“With all sincerity, I’ve been blessed to talk with Tim a lot about the market and where it’s going,” Bergeron said. “He is a very intelligent individual who understands the channel. I think he‘s going to do well. I think you’re going to see some big things over there with him in that position.”

Axcient has been Enterprise Data Concept’s its go-to partner for data protection for a couple of years because of the simplicity of the company’s technology, particularly how easy it is to roll out Axcient’s Direct to Cloud technology, Bergeron said.

“We did a test rollout of the Direct to Cloud application, and it was dead simple,” he said. “Our engineers didn’t think it could be done like that. They’re were just blown away by the simplicity of the rollout. I think we did a 30-day rollout to all of our clients instead of the 90 days we were expecting.”