However, as always in business, you can never afford to rest on your laurels and we will continue to invest in and expand our bleeding-edge cloud security and managed services platforms.  To assist us with this task it gives me great pleasure to welcome on board Francois Daumard as our new vice-president of Global Channel Sales.

Most recently with the mobility management company FiberLink, Francois has a strong background in Channel Sales and has previously worked for such organizations as Apple and Microsoft.  Francois’ experience encompasses Global Sales & Marketing, Operations and establishing international strategic Channel Partner Programs.  He is well-recognized as an active participant in the Channel Community and currently sits on the Vendor Council of CompTIA.

Francois will be responsible for the channel sales teams across the globe.  He brings a tremendous amount of experience to the team and will be working closely with our VP of Marketing & Product Marketing Joanna Brace and her marketing team as we work to add a little sparkle to our channels in 2015.

As we pivot AVG business towards a cloud model, expansion of our global footprint has gathered pace. In 2014 Brazil, Australia, Germany and, following the recent acquisition of Norman Safeground, Scandinavia, DACH and Benelux have all come on stream.

Of course the size of the challenge ahead of us should not be underestimated.  We are not going to convince businesses overnight how radically we have changed as an organisation.  We must show them that today we are the online security company for devices, data and people with a modern consumer and business product portfolio to suit both markets.

Hopefully our continued roll out of market-leading cloud security and remote management solutions coupled with an unwavering commitment to helping our 10,000 global partners and their customers manage large numbers of business mobile devices will help to overturn some of those entrenched perceptions.

In summary, as we build up to the strategically important Mobile World Congress 2015 we can count on a solid framework, closely aligned to the ever changing needs of the Channel, that is capable of carrying us towards our next goal. That goal is to become the market leading applications vendor for streamlined delivery of cloud security and managed services to small and medium sized businesses.