Alex Pinchev President and CEO, Acronis

Acronis Inc. announced the hiring of Alex Pinchev as President and Chief Executive Officer.

 Pinchev will join Acronis on January 17, 2012 and replaces Jason Donahue who has served as Chief Executive Officer since 2008. Mr. Pinchev has served as a Member of the Acronis Board of Directors since November 2010, and will continue to serve on the Board of Directors as the Chief Executive Officer appointee.

Pinchev has over 30 years’ experience in building and growing companies. He joins Acronis from Red Hat where he served as an Executive Vice President for the last nine years and was most recently the President of Global Sales, Services & Field Marketing. Pinchev’s business and technology leadership has been instrumental in Red Hat’s growth and expansion into emerging markets. His experience in the storage management and virtualization markets, combined with his experience driving effective global teams, will maximize Acronis’ growth opportunities.

"Acronis has a winning combination of talented employees and market leading technology, with a broad channel ecosystem and a great global customer base," commented Pinchev. "With a successful business in data protection and disaster recovery solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, Acronis now has the opportunity to further develop its routes-to-market and expand its technology presence. I am excited to join the talented team at Acronis and to meet the growing demands of our customers worldwide."

Acronis is a growing privately-held software companies in the United States. Since first launching disk imaging technology in 2003, Acronis now has over 175,000 business customers and over 3 million consumer customers worldwide, served by a network of more than 20,000 partners. With the launch earlier this year of Acronis Backup & Recovery 11, which supports all major virtual hypervisors including VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat, Citrix, and Parallels, and Acronis vmProtect 6 for VMware vSphere servers, the company is now positioned to take advantage of the growing virtualization market opportunity as more businesses adopt new IT strategies.

"We are proud to have an industry leader of Alex’s caliber join us at this time in the Company’s development," said Ilya Zubarev, Chairman of the Board at Acronis. "Since Alex joined our Board in 2010, we have benefited from his extensive experience, sharp business acumen and vision for the future development of the virtual and cloud markets. We believe that Alex’s strong leadership will accelerate Acronis’ journey to be a global leader in backup & recovery solutions not only for physical servers, but for virtual environments, and into the cloud."

Prior to joining Acronis, Pinchev was the President of Global Sales Services & Field Marketing of Red Hat Inc., a position he held since April 2008 and prior to that Pinchev served as an Executive Vice President of Global Sales and President of International at Red Hat Inc. for five years.

Prior to Red Hat, he served as an Executive Vice President of MRO Software Inc. from June 2002 to December 2002. He was the founder of software company Maincontrol, Inc. and served as its Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer from July 1996 to June 2002. Pinchev founded two software companies in Europe and served as their President and Chief Executive Officer from 1987 to 1996. Pinchev holds several Board positions. He has been a Director of Acronis Inc. since November 2010. He has been a Director of Qualys, Inc. and LogiXML since 2008.

Pinchev holds a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science Master degree in Computer Science.