Maxava Hires DR Expert Richard Dolewski

May 7, 2013 Alex Woodie

Maxava has put renowned IBM i disaster recovery (DR) expert Richard Dolewski on the payroll as part of a push to bolster its personnel in the United States.

As Maxava’s new chief business continuity officer, Dolewski will speak at events, provide high-level consulting, and generally function as an ambassador to the high availability (HA) software and services company, Maxava’s senior vice president Simon O’Sullivan explains to IT Jungle. “It’s a really good addition to the team,” he says.

“We are tremendously excited to welcome Richard to the Maxava team,” Maxava CEO Allan Campbell said in a press release. “His industry profile, outstanding reputation, and wealth of experience and understanding of the IBM i market will allow us to better communicate our message around reliable, quality, and easily managed HA/DR solutions to IBM i focused partners and end users.”

Dolewski most recently was at Velocity Technology Solutions, an IT consultancy and managed service provider (MSP) that provides application management as well as hosted DR and high availability solutions. Previously, Dolewski worked for WTS before it was acquired by Velocity in 2011.

The hiring of Dolewski appears to be a good fit, especially considering Dolewski’s recent experience working with cloud-hosted DR and HA accounts at Velocity. While Maxava today gets most of its revenues from selling on-premise software, it expects cloud-based HA software to be the big bread winner in the future. To that end, the company is working to build a cloud business model, which involves establishing partnerships with multiple MSPs, including Baseline Data Services, Meridian Group International, mindSHIFT Technologies, and Symmetry. (While Dolewski worked with Maxava’s software on behalf of customers while at Velocity, Velocity isn’t an official Maxava MSP partner.)

The hiring of Dolewski, who lives in the Seattle, Washington, area, is the second major addition to Maxava’s executive ranks in as many months. At the COMMON show in Austin, Texas, Maxava announced that it had hired John Dominic (formerly of Halcyon Software) to be its new vice president of sales.

“We’re doing a major push in the United States. We’ve really upped our team over there,” O’Sullivan said last week from Maxava’s headquarters in New Zealand. “We’re beefing up our U.S. presence.”