Wasabi Technologies, the hot cloud storage company, has expanded its leadership bench in the APAC with the additions of Aki Wakimoto and Andrew Sandes as Country Managers for Japan and Australia respectively. Wakimoto and Sandes will drive growth as Wasabi continues its expansion to meet the demand for high-performance, affordable cloud storage in APAC.
What will the recruits bring to Wasabi in their roles?
Wakimoto will spearhead Wasabi’s growth strategy in the country, working closely with King to build Wasabi’s go-to-market team, drive value for channel partners and customers, and help deliver storage solutions that maximize the ROI of data across organizations. Wakimoto brings over 20 years of experience in the Japanese IT industry to her new role at Wasabi.
Previously she served as President and Representative Director of SolarWinds Japan where she grew the firm’s client and channel business, and implemented a complete IT Operations Management (ITOM) product portfolio to support the digital transformation of Japanese enterprises. She has also held a number of sales and operations roles with CA Technologies, Citrix Systems, and Adobe Systems and was also President of Pulse Secure Japan.
Sandes holds over 20 years of experience across Oceania, Japan and the wider APAC region, helping customers solve their biggest problems using leading technologies like cloud storage.
Prior to Wasabi, Sandes served as Country Manager for ANZ at Empflifi and was previously GM Asia Pacific at Lithium Technologies (now Khoros) working with large enterprises across the region to provide solutions to high scale online and social customer service challenges.
Sandes spent five years working in corporate advisory, executing cross border M&A, and capital raising transactions in the tech, media, and telecommunications sectors. He has also held several sales and business development roles across the technology sector in APAC.
Sandes will now focus on strategies with Aussie partners, build a team to support Wasabi’s channel, and evangelize the value proposition of cloud storage to clients who are dealing with ransomware, data sovereignty, and unpredictable costs of hyperscale storage providers.
What is Wasabi’s market offering?
Wasabi has taken on an expansive rollout to support the region with cloud storage that is a fifth the cost of hyperscalers, with no fees for egress or API requests and no vendor lock-in.
Businesses are able to seamlessly, securely and affordably store all of their data and access it the moment they need it without complex pricing tiers. The executive appointments of Wakimoto and Sandes follow the opening of four storage regions – Tokyo, Osaka, Sydney, and most recently Singapore – and the appointment of long-time Asia Pacific industry veteran Michael King to Vice President, General Manager of Asia Pacific in May 2022.
“APAC is becoming one of Wasabi’s most vital markets, and we are strategically building our operations to support the opportunities in Japan and Australia. I have witnessed firsthand how successful Aki and Andrew have been in their markets, building optimized channels of distribution and driving customer success. They will take us to the next level,” said King.
Wasabi now serves customers in over 100 countries, storing data ranging from backups, disaster and ransomware recovery, archiving, video surveillance, sports data, media and entertainment files, and more. For more information about Wasabi, please visit the website.
