Davinia Simon (Stax)
Australian cloud management platform Stax is expanding into New Zealand and Southeast Asia following the appointment of former Amazon Web Services (AWS) head of channel and alliances Davinia Simon as its new head of sales and growth markets.
Stax, which began as a product division at AWS partner Versent, will now operate as a standalone entity with Thor Essman as co-founder and managing director. Stax's first managing director, Mike Middaugh departed in August to pursue other opportunities.
Essman remains chairman of the board of directors at Versent and will work closely with Stax co-founder and chief product officer James Coxon to build the Stax brand and attract further funding and talent to help the business scale.
The company has firm plans to expand into New Zealand and Southeast Asia by the first quarter of 2022, closely following on from its recent distribution deal with Nextgen.
“Davinia understands AWS customers and partners better than anyone," Essman said. “She knows the pain points they can experience when deploying cloud infrastructure and the innovation that can be achieved when the foundation is built right. I look forward to expanding Stax to new channels and markets under her leadership.”
Under her new remit, Simon will develop the Stax go-to-market strategy and partner program, which will position the company for international expansion.
“I am delighted to join Stax and hope to accelerate Stax culture for innovation,” Simon said. “I fundamentally believe in the crucial and unique role Stax plays in helping customers attain the most from their AWS environments.
“Stax is a sophisticated and effortless solution to an inherently complex global problem. Based on all the current success metrics, Stax undoubtedly has a global trajectory ahead of it and I’m excited to be a part of the team to take this business to the next stage.”
During the past year, Stax has managed to increase its year-on-year revenue by 175 per cent, doubled its headcount to more than 60 employees and raised A$23.6 million in private funding, investing A$37 million into research and development throughout FY21.
In order to support its next growth phase, Stax has also made some additional hires to drive sales, operations and marketing, including appointing Versent’s Amanda Iwasaki as Stax’s head of operations. At the same time,Prayna Prasad joins from Fujitsu and Macquarie Data Centres as head of marketing.
With offices in Sydney and Melbourne, Stax is currently hiring for a range of engineering and channel-focused roles. Its platform is available on AWS Marketplace and via selected partners.
“Our philosophy is to constantly challenge the IT industry to bring greater discipline, automation, craftsmanship and delivery excellence to enterprise technology. The Stax platform is a dynamic symbol of this, helping our customers drive cloud outcomes with more impact, lower risk and lower cost,” Essman said.
Credit: Stax Stax customers include Event Hospitality and Entertainment (EVT), Daymark and car sales.
“Event Cinemas Group selected Stax to support our cloud migration to AWS. Rather than creating a traditional, custom-built, bespoke cloud foundation, we saw Stax as a way to accelerate our implementation,” head of strategy and architectures at EVT, Abhishek Anupuri, said.
“The Stax platform helped EVT implement best practice cloud foundations that aligned to the AWS well-architected principles and helped migrate our workloads faster than we could have done in-house.
“We now use Stax to provide a single view across our AWS environment, including access, provisioning, costs and compliance. We don’t need to wrangle data, it’s all there in the one platform, freeing up our time to make more well-informed decisions.”
