New Axcient CEO takes over at 'new company'

Axcient’s new CEO started this week at a company that has the same name as it did at its beginning but looks quite different after a recent merger.

David Bennett, formerly the chief revenue officer at cybersecurity firm Webroot, began his job as Axcient CEO on Monday.

In 2017, Axcient merged with eFolder, bringing together Axcient’s cloud-based disaster recovery and data protection platform and eFolder’s cloud business continuity, cloud file sync and cloud-to-cloud backup. After existing as Axcient-eFolder for a while, the company is now called Axcient.

Axcient’s Business Availability Suite includes backup, business continuity, recovery and cloud migration. The vendor sells its products through managed service providers (MSPs).

Over a 10-year period, Bennett had a number of leadership roles at Webroot, which was acquired by data protection vendor Carbonite in February. He also held leadership positions at Lenovo and Sony.

“It’s a natural progression,” Bennett said of going from Webroot to Axcient CEO.

Axcient has made security a focus, which is important as Bennett noted that hackers often target service providers that serve multiple businesses versus attacking just one SMB.

“It’s not a matter of if, it’s when,” the Axcient CEO said of the possibility of being hit with a cyberattack.

Other trends in Axcient’s market include customers transitioning from on-premises Microsoft applications to the cloud-based Office 365, as well as striving for compliance in an increasingly complicated regulatory environment, said CMO Angus Robertson.

‘Not the old Axcient’

Though they existed in the same general market, Axcient and eFolder had different technologies, platforms and customer bases. The eFolder line of products, including backup and disaster recovery platform Replibit, was geared toward SMBs. Axcient was a pioneer of disaster recovery as a service and had a more midmarket reach, but also hit SMBs and the enterprise.

Robertson said the company is focused on combining the best of both and what it’s calling “business availability,” all backed by the Axcient Cloud.

“We’re not the old Axcient,” said President Eric White. “It is a new company.”

The internal transitioning started in late 2017, White said. That process included a re-commitment to the channel. Axcient now claims about 3,000 MSPs.

Bennett replaced Matt Nachtrab, who left the CEO post in 2018. In November, the company rebranded from Axcient-eFolder to Axcient. The company is based in Denver, where eFolder had its headquarters. Axcient was previously based in California.

“We are a profitable organization now because of the work we did in 2018,” White said.

Future rollouts include the launch of a “business availability” portal as one place to access all Axcient products, as well as enhanced features in Axcient’s cloud, including multi-tenancy and faster recovery time.