Scott Crenshaw SVP Strategy and CMO, Acronis

Acronis International GmbH announced the appointment of Scott Crenshaw as SVP of strategy and chief marketing officer.  

In this newly-created role, he will drive corporate strategy as Acronis accelerates expansion beyond traditional backup and recovery solutions to address the challenges created by the consumerisation of IT. To unlock the promise of cloud and virtual infrastructure, enterprises need solutions for secure access, availability and protection.He brings experience and market-understanding that will enable Acronis to deliver a new generation of solutions to customers worldwide.

"IT organisations are struggling to maintain control and relevance as end users introduce iPads, cloud services and other new collaboration tools that demand access to the network," commented Crenshaw, SVP of strategy and CMO at Acronis. "When combined with the volume and velocity of data creation, this new BYOD user-led IT frontier presents unnecessary data access, availability and protection headaches. Ironically, technologies for cloud and virtualisation, which were intended to simplify, have created an IT management nightmare. Acronis is well positioned to build on its strong heritage and help organisations maximise the capability of the cloud and the virtual infrastructure."

 Crenshaw joins Acronis from Red Hat where he served as VP and GM of its cloud business unit, leading strategy and execution in the cloud computing and virtualisation markets. Prior to starting Red Hat’s Cloud Business Unit, he led Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux Business Unit for six years. In these roles, he challenged large incumbent players, delivering greater choice, flexibility and interoperability to the industry, and helped to create the public and private clouds that much of the world relies on today. He was also a founder and president of the Open Virtualization Alliance.

"Scott has an invaluable combination of strong vision, leadership, product strategy and business development skill with an unsurpassed understanding of the cloud and virtualisation market landscape," said Alex Pinchev, president and CEO, Acronis. "His proven ability to deliver results in competitive markets makes Scott the perfect candidate to extend Acronis’ reach into the enterprise and leverage the technologies we’ve gained through our recent acquisition of GroupLogic. Acronis has a huge opportunity ahead, Scott will be instrumental in helping Acronis to reach its potential."

Throughout his career, Crenshaw has held a number of executive positions at technology companies including CEO at security technology company NTRU and VP of product development at enterprise software vendor Datawatch.

He was a Sloan Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management and received an MBA from MIT and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from North Carolina State University.