Centralnic and its Companies Reshuffle Leadership

Centralnic, which is a publicly traded company, is arguably the fastest growing company in the DNS space these days. Sure, GoDaddy and some other companies in the space might be bigger, but Centralnic’s growth has been truly impressive.

Yesterday they announced a number of changes to their management team.

First off, in what might come as a bit of a surprise to observers, Alex Siffrin will be leaving the company. Siffrin was the founder and head honcho at Key Systems since the beginning and after its merger with Centralnic he had stayed on as COO. His family will still be one of the largest shareholders in the group, but Alex is stepping down immediately.

Robbie Birkner, who was one of the founders of Hexonet, which was acquired by Centralnic, had left the industry entirely. He’s now back to head up their reseller division.

Other changes involved existing key members of staff Stuart Fuller, Gavin Brown, Tony Kim and Oliver Fries. Basically they’re moving people around a little and it looks like they’re playing to their strengths. Details below:

Stuart Fuller has been appointed as the Head of Brand Services Division, overseeing BrandShelter and CentralNic’s interest in Thomsen Trampedach, which delivers domain portfolio management and brand protection services to Corporate clients. Stuart brings over 14 years of experience in the industry and joined CentralNic three years ago as Group Commercial Director, after eleven years at corporate domain name management and brand protection firm NetNames (now CSC). His earlier career was in the telco industry, with Cable and Wireless and other leading companies. Stuart also retains certain group-wide commercial operations responsibilities.

Gavin Brown has been appointed Head of Registry Solutions, providing registry software and managed services to country code Top-Level Domain names globally, as well as being the world’s leading distributor of new Top-Level Domains, with over 47% global market share. Gavin brings over 20 years of experience and is CentralNic’s longest-serving employee. He will also retain his role as Chief Innovation Officer for the Group. Before taking that role in 2019, Gavin was CTO of CentralNic for fourteen years.

Tony Kim has been appointed as the Head of Product, responsible for managing new product development and onboarding across Group companies. Tony has over 18 years of experience in the industry, and was formerly Manager of CentralNic’s Hexonet reseller business, which he co-founded in 2009. Previously he was General Manager at Hostway Canada and Director of Product Development for Hostway Corp USA.

Oliver Fries has been appointed Head of Shared Services, and will oversee technology and other shared services for the Reseller, Retail, Registry Solutions and Brand Services business divisions. Oliver brings over 17 years of experience in technical and managerial roles and will be focusing on key activities around infrastructure, systems, development, support and domain procurement. Oliver previously held the position of CTO at CentralNic’s subsidiary Key-Systems where he played a key role in shaping its core technology as well as helping the company grow and evolve. He previously worked in the Telecommunication sector as a software developer and project manager.

The moves sound very positive for the company.

By Michele Neylon

Michele is founder and managing director of Irish domain registrar and hosting company Blacknight. Michele has been deeply involved in domain and internet policy discussions for more than a decade. He also co-hosts the Technology.ie podcast.

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