Brian Burns VP AsiaPac, Cloudian

Cloudian, Inc. announced that Brian Burns has joined the company as VP, AsiaPac.

Based in Tokyo, he brings more than 20 years of executive experience in leading APAC sales, market entry and strategic relationships for high-growth North American technology companies.

In his new role, he is responsible for expanding presence in the region, helping customers overcome the challenges of managing and protecting ever-growing data volumes on-premises and across hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments.

APAC Business Scaling Experience
Fluent in Chinese and Japanese, Burns most recently served as GM, North Asia for HashiCorp and as regional VP, North Asia for Hortonworks before that. At both HashiCorp and Hortonworks, he built businesses from the ground up, including sales, support, and channel programs in Japan, China, Korea and Singapore. Earlier in his career, he worked for Microsoft and Apple in Asia. He is an adjunct professor of data analytics at New York University.

“Business in APAC is uniquely challenging due to the multitude of cultures, languages, solution ecosystems and customer expectations,” said Michael Tso, CEO. “Brian’s deep APAC experience and history of success will drive our growth beyond the U.S. and Europe and extend the benefits of Cloudian’s limitless scalability, industry-best S3 compatibility and seamless on-prem and multi-cloud integration to more users.”

Building on Cloudian’s APAC Roots
Since 2011 when Cloudian was co-founded by Japanese mobile internet pioneer Hiroshi Ohta, the company has had strong ties to Asia. Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ) was an early investor, and some of Asia’s largest companies backed Cloudian’s $94 million series E financing last August. The Asian backers in series E included new investors NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Japan Post Investment and Digital Garage, as well as existing investors INCJ and Lenovo.

Now spanning industries such as financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, manufacturing, government, and media and entertainment, Cloudian’s customer base in the region includes NTT (Cloudian’s first customer), Continental Automotive of Singapore, one of the fastest growing TV stations in Southeast Asia and a national health agency.

“Nearly eight years ago, Cloudian predicted that the S3 API would become the industry standard and made the strategic decision to build the world’s first and best native S3-compatible on-premise object storage product,” said Burns. “That vision has paid off, as Cloudian Hyperstore is now the most widely deployed independent object storage worldwide. I’m excited to introduce APAC customers to this remarkable company with visionary management, superb technical talent and an extraordinary corporate culture.”