Thursday, October 9, 2008

Disaster recovery firm Acronis attracts West Coast serial CEO

By Mass High Tech Staff

Acronis Inc. has named five-time technology CEO Jason Donahue to replace Walter Scott as its chief executive, bringing Donahue from the West Coast to lead the Burlington-based storage-management software company.

Donahue most recently served as president and CEO of ClearApp until that company was acquired by Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) in September.

Former Acronis CEO Walter Scott remains with the company in an advisory capacity. Scott, who remains a shareholder of Acronis, joined the company three years ago when Acronis revenue was less than $20 million and built the company to its current level of $120 million in revenue for 2008.

Burlington-based Acronis, founded in San Francisco in 2002, develops storage management and disaster recovery software.

Prior to California-based ClearApp, Donahue was the CEO of Meiosys Inc., a California-based virtualization company acquired by IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) in 2005. Before that, he was CEO of California-based Ejasent Inc. when it was acquired in 2004 by Veritas Software Corp. for $59 million. Donahue was also CEO of TeleComputing Inc. and Apptix Inc., and he served in executive roles at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young and Telesphere Solutions.

Acronis makes scalable storage management and disaster recovery software for both large enterprises and small or midsize businesses to safeguard information. The company operates offices in the United States, Europe and Asia and sells its products both direct and through enterprise resellers.