Seismic bolsters APAC operations with raft of new executive appointments

Richard Kulkarni is the new vice president, Asia Pacific for Seismic, as the sales and marketing platform looks to bolster its operations across Austraila and the Asia Pacific region with a raft of new senior hires.

The comany is accelerating its growth across APAC, having acquired local enterprise customers in the financial services, telco and business services sectors among others.

Based put of Australia, Kulkarni will oversee region-wide business operations. Kulkarni has more than 25 years' experience in the information technology industry. With specialty in building high-growth software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, he has held leadership roles with Software AG, CA Technologies and Qualtrics.

Kulkarni is joined by Sarah Hayward (senior director for global accounts ANZ), James Shands (senior director for enterprise sales ANZ) and Joseph Halavazis (senior director for enterprise sales ANZ), who will grow the company's global and enterprise client base in Australia and New Zealand.

Hayward, formerly managing director of Calastone, has received industry recognition for her extensive experience as a fintech leader driving business outcomes with banking, wealth and asset management clients.

Shands comes to Seismic with a strong sales management background at Qrious and Ricoh in New Zealand.

Halavazis joins Seismic following management stints at McGrath Estate Agents as well as other media and retail brands.

"Companies in ANZ and Asia continue to leave money on the table because they fail to capitalise on intelligent automation and insights to help the customer make purchasing decisions," says Kulkarni.

"At the same time, their digital transformation efforts are impacted by the lack of alignment across their business functions. These are challenges we want to help organisations overcome with AI-driven content analytics and campaign orchestration," he explains.

"In a recent Seismic-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, 85% of respondents believe buyers will dismiss a seller in the first interaction if they don't receive tailored information," says Kulkarni.

"When you consider today's rapid digitisation, the organisations that will prevail are those which can harness analytics to create personalised experiences by delivering the right insights at the right time for their customers.

Seismic has also expanded its APAC team based in Australia with the hire of Iris Chan as director, marketing APAC, who with over 20 years in B2B technology marketing, will lead Seismic's regional marketing strategy drawing on experience from her management roles at IBM and Cisco. Most recently the CMO at sales acceleration startup FusionGrove, Chan is also a diversity advocate actively involved in related industry initiatives.

Also joining the team is Hydar Al Ammar as director, partner and alliances APAC, who has 13 years of experience in corporate advisory, organisational development, partnerships and alliances from previous roles at KPMG and Thomson Reuters. Hydar is responsible for building Seismic's regional partner ecosystem and managing strategic alliance relationships.

Max Verma joins the team as senior director, sales engineering APAC, who was formerly Head of Solution Architecture APJ at SAP Qualtrics. Max will draw on expertise in customer experience and data analytics from his time at Westpac and Infosys to drive Seismic's pre-sales capabilities and value consulting for customers.

"With enterprises moving to the cloud and an increasingly digital workforce, organisations need to change the way they create value for customers," says Doug Winter, Seismic CEO and co-founder.

"Building a robust team of local talent on the ground in Australia enables us to better support organisations in achieving greater levels of business agility and customer engagement," he says.

"It's the right time to elevate our presence in Australia and beyond. We are very proud to have Richard at the helm leading the next phase of our regional expansion efforts. We now have on board a team of proven leaders to foster stronger relationships with our APAC customers and partners.