Axcient Taps Former Barracuda Networks Exec As New CEO

‘Really what I’m focused on: how do we scale the company up and accelerate our growth in 2023. So I’m going to spend the rest of this year—we’re basically 90 days until the end of the fiscal year—essentially doing a listening tour, talking to partners, talking to employees, talking to folks in the industry,’ says Axcient President and CEO Rod Mathews.

Axcient, the Denver-based provider of data protection and business continuity technology aimed squarely at MSPs, has a new leader. Rod Mathews, the former general manager for the data protection business of Barracuda Networks, started Monday as Axcient’s new president and CEO.

Mathews takes over the reins at Axcient from David Bennett, who left the company this summer to become president of Object First, a startup developer of purpose-build data protection appliances that just exited stealth mode.

Mathews, in what he called his first meeting with anyone from outside Axcient since he took his new role, told CRN that helping Axcient scale its operations to make it easier to on-board MSPs and their customers is key to the kind of growth he and the company’s board of directors are expecting.

“As we add more partners, as we add more customers, our ability to go out and find new partners, our ability to onboard the new partners that we have, our ability to help them onboard their new customers, our ability to provide the capacity and the performance that those customers need, needs to grow,” he said. “We need to be the last line of defense for these customers if they have a malicious deletion of data, accidental deletion, malware, they get attacked by ransomware, or whatever the case is.”

Mathews also said he understands the importance of keeping Axcient’s focus squarely on its growing MSP base. At Barracuda, a big part of his role was being the MSP champion at the company after that company’s 2015 acquisition of Intronis which brought it a huge MSP business.

“We are absolutely going to be focused on MSPs going forward,” he said. “I think as MSPs look to buy through different channels, we may have other things to support those MSPs from a channel perspective, but MSPs are our focus. And I think that‘s where the market is going for the size customers that we sell to.”

For an in-depth look at how Axcient will change—and how much will remain the same—under new CEO Mathews, click through the slideshow.

What drew you to Axcient?

Well, I know this space very well, from my background. I’ve been around this for a long time. The biggest thing at Axcient is it is obviously a great market opportunity. And we see a lot of opportunity there. And I think personally, our growth can really be accelerated. We’re pretty strong right now, in the strong double digits. And I think we’ve got a great opportunity to accelerate that next year with our x360 products.

Talk a little about your storage and managed service provider experience.

I ran the data protection business at Barracuda for about five years. And all of the acquisitions we did there to get into the MSP market, the Intronis acquisition that we did and some follow-ons, were all things that I drove. So right around the time they announced Intronis and talked about going deeper into the MSP market, that was a great opportunity for us to redirect the company from the traditional VAR market into the MSP market. And the fact that Axcient has already focused on MSPs and has a great set of products and capabilities and integrations that fit into that MSP market is fantastic. Technology-wise, we‘ve got a lot of advantages in the market around how we do the disaster recovery-as-a-service component, specifically. But also just generally around a single BCDR (business continuity and disaster recovery) platform that covers cloud applications, covers direct-to-cloud, covers traditional use cases, we can really be a one-stop shop for MSPs that want to solve customer problems.

As you come into Axcient, what are some things that you bring from your previous role that you think will really have an impact there?

I think helping the company scale. I’ve been in much larger organizations, and I’ve seen the types of systems and ways we‘re going to need to help our partners on-board, the way we’re going to need to help make our partner successful. All of those kinds of things at larger scale are things that are in my background operationally. And that‘s really what I’m focused on: how do we scale the company up and accelerate our growth in 2023. So I’m going to spend the rest of this year—we’re basically 90 days until the end of the fiscal year—essentially doing a listening tour, talking to partners, talking to employees, talking to folks in the industry. Next month’s IT Nation conference will be a great place to ask a lot of questions.

I need to get up to speed on the world that I live in now at Axcient. I‘m going to spend a good solid 90 days from now to the end of the quarter really learning that. And then we’re going to put in place a growth plan for next year to accelerate our growth and be a better partner for our partners.

You talked about scaling. How important is scaling to your plans for Axcient?

As we add more partners, as we add more customers, our ability to go out and find new partners, our ability to onboard the new partners that we have, our ability to help them onboard their new customers, our ability to provide the capacity and the performance that those customers need, needs to grow. We need to be the last line of defense for these customers if they have a malicious deletion of data, accidental deletion, malware, they get attacked by ransomware, or whatever the case is. Hurricane Ian comes through and customers lose physical infrastructure and need to failover to the cloud. Those are all things that we have to be able to do for those customers. And the reason that they are working with us and paying [for managed services], when their customers have these times of need, they‘re absolutely depending on us to deliver those capabilities. And so we have to make sure that we’re growing to be able to continue to do that.

Does Axcient expect to maintain its MSP-only focus going forward?

We are absolutely going to be focused on MSPs going forward. I think as MSPs look to buy through different channels, we may have other things to support those MSPs from a channel perspective, but MSPs are our focus. And I think that‘s where the market is going for the size customers that we sell to. When you look at SMB-sized customers, the medium-sized are probably getting larger. This is how they’re all going to buy. They don‘t have IT resources internally. They’re all budget-constrained. They‘re all looking for ways to solve the problems that they have, and to do it more effectively. And so, for us coming in and offering more capabilities for the same price that they might be paying a competitor, that’s going to be really attractive, especially in this environment that we‘re sailing into these days.

So what’s your message to MSPs on your first week at Axcient?

The first message to them is, thank you for being our partners. But the second is, we‘re going to focus on doing everything we can to make them successful, help them grow their businesses, and provide industry-leading innovations and services to help them do that.

So coming into Axcient, do you have a mandate from the board of directors to maybe work towards an IPO or make acquisitions?

My orders from the board of directors are to accelerate growth. That’s the thing that we’re all focused on. And that’s one of the things we can control in a lot of ways. We can control how we allocate our resources. We can control where we invest. We can control how we try to drive more growth. We don’t have a lot of control over what happens out in the market, and what happens from an M&A perspective. And those discussions happen all the time, especially when markets change. And we’ll always look at opportunities to do things. But our mandate right now is to grow. That’s what we‘re focused on.

But that growth could include acquisitions?

It could if the right acquisition came along. I don’t have a prescribed list that in my head we do these things. But I’m always open-minded to opportunities in the market.

What are some of the changes in the storage and data protection industry that you’re following most closely in your new role as the head of Axcient?

Obviously, the move from on-premises applications to cloud-based applications is one of the big ones. And that changes how you think about getting access to data, how you back that data up, how you recover access to that data. And we live in a kind of a dual world here where some of our customers still have on-premises applications, and they might still be running Exchange, or applications built on SQL Server or what have you. Others of our customers have fully moved on to cloud applications like Microsoft 365 or Google Apps. We need to be able to service both of those. And many of our MSPs have customers living in both of those camps, too. So I think, building for the new world of cloud-based apps while we still doing everything we need to do to support those customers that are continuing to deploy on-prem is that transition that I think we can really help enable.