San Francisco-based cloud communications specialist Twilio has established a presence in Australia and has named former Oracle and Symantec exec Richard Watson as its first regional country director.
The Australian foothold will be the firm’s eleventh international office outside the US, with Twilio saying the move will create jobs in sales, customer success, service and provide support in Sydney and Melbourne.
Twilio offers developers and businesses a raft of cloud-based tools to build customer engagement features into their business applications, using a set of APIs for voice, messaging and video.
Watson brings two decades of sales leadership experience to his new role, which will be key to the company as it expands its presence in Australia. He most recently led sales teams for enterprise, commercial and channels as senior sales director at Symantec. Prior to that, Watson also held sales leadership roles at Oracle, Sun Microsystems, RSA Security and CA Technologies.
“International expansion represents a significant long-term growth opportunity for Twilio,” said George Hu, chief operating officer at Twilio. “This move builds on our existing customer and developer momentum in Australia and lays the foundation for building a significant long-term business in Australia and across the APAC region. “
“We have had a fantastic amount of organic traction here in Australia, with leading companies including Atlassian, zipMoney, Dominos and Airtasker already building and scaling their applications using the Twilio platform,” said Watson. “There is a strong culture of innovation here and IT leaders in Aussie enterprises recognise the opportunities that new technologies can offer their business.”