Aviatrix has had several milestones in Australia throughout its history. In early 2020, the Aviatrix Certified Engineer (ACE) team, an expert crew that delivers comprehensive learning courses for multicloud networking certification, was in Australia hosting an in-person ACE Associate training when the Covid lockdowns went into effect. Working from down under, they quickly pivoted the program’s strategy to allow participants/students to learn new cloud skills online as they were working remotely and not commuting to work or travelling for business. As a result, the ACE Program ended up closing out 2020 with 10,000 ACEs certified worldwide. This was an enormous increase from the original goal of certifying 500.
Aviatrix has earned the trust of more than 500 enterprise customers spanning the globe and the company’s biggest customer, the world’s largest mining company, is based in Australia. It’s no wonder that today we’re investing more heavily in the region. This includes having new feet on the ground in Australia. Hired in late 2023, George Tsoukas was appointed Country Sales Manager with the mission to re-energize and build a long-standing presence across Australia, New Zealand (ANZ), and Asia-Pacific (APAC).
We recently sat down with George to learn more about him and what he has in store for increasing visibility and generating business in his territory.
Q: Why did you join Aviatrix?
A: Having been in the industry for many years, I’ve had countless conversations with customers discussing the complexities of multicloud and hybrid cloud environments. Issues that were once confined to on-premises were now growing more challenging when moving to cloud. When cloud and networking converged, it became of greater importance to have mechanisms in place that could handle both environments.
After spending time analyzing the market, it was evident to me that Aviatrix had identified this issue early on and was well poised to address the challenges. Aviatrix went on to include security capabilities, and for me it was a no-brainer. Knowing that Doug Merritt had recently joined after taking Splunk to astronomical heights in terms of customer adoption was the icing on the cake for me.
Q: What problem(s) do you see Aviatrix solving for customers in your region?
A: I think customers have finally realized that migrating their applications and services to the cloud, more often than not, creates greater complexity than they envisioned. The challenge is further compounded when it comes to security.
Australia has long been a leader when it comes to the adoption of new concepts and technologies. For example, the country was the most virtualized market in the world when the likes of VMware released such concepts to the market. I believe Australia, together with the rest of Asia-Pacific (APAC), is poised to really capitalize on and drive the adoption of solutions that make networking in the cloud simpler, more secure, and allow greater visibility than what was previously available.
That’s where Aviatrix comes in. We are cloud networking experts, and we are on a mission to simplify cloud networking. Customers want to get rid of as much complexity as possible, without compromising performance, reliability, or security. They want the flexibility to be able to deploy their applications and services securely in one cloud or multiple clouds, without the cost, and with a simple interface to do so.
Q: As the new Country Manager of ANZ and APAC, what are your initial priorities?
A: While we have a healthy customer base in APAC, the reality is that we’re a relatively unknown entity—a true start-up within a start-up, if you will. My plan is to start at the grassroots level by creating awareness in the market directly, and together with a partner ecosystem, which I intend to grow.
Aviatrix embraces the true power of partnerships and is an incredibly channel-friendly vendor. I plan to engage a small group of niche partners in our region who can help us scale and address the market need. The opportunity for Aviatrix is huge and I’m super energised. There are many enterprises that have invested in cloud, but are overwhelmed by the complexity, and looking for solutions to help simplify their deployments – without compromising speed or security. If you know of any organisation that fits this description, please let’s discuss what we can do to help.
We also plan to build on our existing customer relationships in industries including (but not limited to) mining, mid- to large-tier enterprise, and government customers who were early adopters and quickly realised the benefits that Aviatrix brought to the table. All of this, combined with our presence across cloud service providers, including AWS, Azure, Google, etc., presents a massive opportunity for us in the region.
In the coming months, our leadership team will be touching down in Australia to meet customers, prospects, and partners to share customer success stories from abroad, walk through the company’s latest roadmap, and build on existing relationships whilst cultivating new ones.
Q: What is the ideal partner you are seeking to connect and build a future with?
A: The ideal partner has a thorough understanding of traditional networking, combined with a focus on cloud and security. This may sound like an oxymoron, but these worlds are heavily converging, and our customers are looking not only to us, but to our partners as well to help them navigate this landscape and deploy their applications and services into this hybrid world we now live in.
My plan is not to enroll hundreds of partners. Instead, I’ll take a more targeted approach to ensure that our mission and values are aligned, and that our select partners have the capability, trusted relationships, and drive to deliver.
Q: As you look to increase Aviatrix’s presence, what types of roles will you be looking to hire?
A: Aviatrix consistently strives to hire the best talent in the market. Like our partners, there is a specific skill set we seek to hire, and it includes networking, cloud, and security expertise. We also look for team players who want to learn by doing and grow with the company. My plan is to build my team over the next 24 months, including sales, pre-sales engineers, channel managers, business development, customer success and marketing. I’m confident with our growth plan, we may look to hire more quickly. Stay tuned.
For those interested in joining my team, visit our careers page, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I’d also encourage you to also check out our ACE Program. There are now self-paced online training courses for five out of the eight ACE courses offered.
About George Tsoukas
George joined Aviatrix as Country Sales Manager for Australia. He has been in the IT industry for nearly 30 years, originally as an engineer, then moving into sales and sales leadership. He has worked at a number of large IT companies, including Ericsson, Cisco, F5, VMware, EMC, and a number of startups such as AppDynamics, Avi Networks, Cato Networks, BlueCat Networks. His passion is building highly energized sales teams and breaking into new markets, while having a lot of fun along the way. Connect with George on LinkedIn.
