Cohesityhas appointed Gregg Petersen as regional director for its operations in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region. Petersen will focus on empowering regional businesses in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, and South Africa to easily and effectively back up, manage, protect, and derive value from their data through Cohesity’s next-gen data management solutions.

Petersen, a prominent figure in the MEA IT industry, brings 14 years of relevant experience to Cohesity, including his most recent role at Rackspace. He will work closely with channel and ecosystem partners as customers in the MEA region embrace modern, cloud-native data management solutions.     

Rawad Zaki will support these efforts, serving as a Senior Account Manager for Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Levant. Most recently Zaki held a similar position for Veeam.

Cohesity’s next-gen data management technology helps customers combat the on-going threat of ransomware attacks with exceptional data protection and recovery capabilities; accelerate the move to the cloud; make it easy to manage workloads and data sources across hybrid and multicloud environments; and supports businesses’ efforts to comply with data compliance regulations.

Petersen will also work closely with global technology alliance partners including Cisco, HPE, and Pure Storage and hyperscale cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, along with an expanded set of local distribution and reseller partners, service providers and global systems integrators (GSIs).

Supporting Quotes –

Petersen on joining Cohesity: “I’m thrilled to join the Cohesity team. I think that we have an exciting opportunity ahead of us, not just to grow Cohesity in MEA, but to grow our partner’s and customer’s business and to contribute to the overall digital transformation of our countries and our region. Years of digital investment have left MEA organisations with multiple siloed stores of data. This fragmentation inhibits their ability to effectively utilise, or derive insight from their data and thus poses a fundamental barrier, not just to digital transformation, but to protection against external threats such as ransomware and corporate espionage. Cohesity enables businesses to unlock the full potential of their most valuable asset, their data – that’s something that MEA businesses can use to their advantage to be more competitive while offering exceptional customer experiences.”

Petersen on the hire of Rawad Zaki: “Having worked closely with Rawad for many years, I firmly believe he is the right person to support the plans we have. In addition to his proven leadership capabilities and commitment to customers, his integrity stands as an assurance to our channel partners that Cohesity will work to protect their best interests as we build mutually beneficial, long-term relationships.”

Petersen on the technology: “I believe Cohesity next-gen data management capabilities will be attractive to the MEA region’s governments, oil & gas, banking, education, and manufacturing sectors among others wherein file sharing, backup and protection, and the management of unstructured data are all key IT objectives that drive business outcomes.”