Anaconda Appoints Shahz Afzal as SVP of Marketing & Strategy

Afzal joins from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and brings over 20 years of experience empowering customers and leading growth initiatives

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Anaconda Inc., provider of the world’s most popular data science platform, announced the appointment of Shahz Afzal as SVP of Marketing & Strategy, who comes from the AWS Marketplace division. Afzal joins with over 20 years of experience supporting customers in finding value in technology investments and accelerating go-to-market strategies through Cloud services.

As SVP of Marketing & Strategy, Afzal will oversee customer and open-source community engagement to support successful collaboration and deployment of Python/R Data Science projects in data centers and the cloud. With over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data generated daily, data science and machine learning tools have experienced rapid enterprise adoption to extract valuable insights, catalyzing digital strategy, speed and scalability. Afzal will lead the customer and community engagement designed to help Anaconda’s users navigate and capitalize on today's vast amounts of data.

“Data is at the center of all great enterprise organizations; harnessing the meaning behind the numbers allows these organizations to drive decisions and innovate at scale and speed—and Anaconda makes that a reality,” said Afzal. “The convergence of Cloud, 5G, and IoT is driving massive digital transformation with data as the currency. To harness the value, organizations need a data science platform that continues to innovate and adapt. This is where the power of open-source innovation is critical and Anaconda is well-positioned to help every organization drive business outcomes quickly, easily, and securely. We’re entering an exciting time of company-wide growth where we’ll help more organizations find deeper meaning in data science directly and through a growing list of partners.”

Afzal most recently served as the Global Head of ISV at AWS, leading go-to-market strategies, data providers and consulting partners within the AWS Marketplace. Prior to AWS, Afzal was Vice President of Marketing for the Hybrid Cloud unit at IBM, responsible for the cloud transformation of the company's application development technology stack. Afzal also spent 15 years at Microsoft, where he oversaw several key initiatives to transition customers and partners to the cloud during the company's early days of cloud services.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Shahz to the Anaconda team. He has a strong understanding of how to scale and transform organizations with the highest regard for brand reputation, which will be incredible assets to Anaconda as we navigate our next phase of company growth,” said Angela Pierce, President and Chief Financial Officer at Anaconda. “So far this year, we’ve continued building on the momentum from 2021, where we grew our active user base to over 25 million individuals across 231 countries and regions, and embraced the incredibly dynamic world of data science. Bringing Shahz onboard will help Anaconda continue to advance our efforts in improving data literacy and involvement in the open-source community through well-executed marketing initiatives.”

In addition to the appointment of Afzal, Anaconda recently welcomed two Python thought leaders, Russell Keith-Magee and Antonio Cuni, to support the company’s trajectory as a data science leader in Python. To learn more about Anaconda and our growing team, visit our careers page.

About Anaconda

With more than 25 million users, Anaconda is the world’s most popular data science platform and the foundation of modern machine learning. We pioneered the use of Python for data science, champion its vibrant community, and continue to steward open-source projects that make tomorrow’s innovations possible. Our enterprise-grade tools are the leading solution for securing and managing commercial uses of Python, and enable corporate, research, and academic institutions around the world to harness the power of open-source for competitive advantage, groundbreaking research, and building a smarter, better world.

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