Chris Drieberg (pictured above) has been promoted to the newly created position of global director of collaborative solutions.

He joined Hitachi Vantara Australia & New Zealand as director of pre-sales and regional chief technology officer two years ago.

Drieberg previously worked for Dell EMC as a regional pre-sales and systems engineering manager.

He has also held sales and pre-sales management positions at Avaya, Optus and Alphawest, and worked in pre-sales and field engineering management at Commander.

"I would like to recognise the enormous contribution of Chris Drieberg," said Hitachi Vantara ANZ VP and managing director Adrian Johnson.

"Chris was doing triple duty covering his CTO / Director of Pre Sales role as well as the Southern Sales Director role until the following two appointments were finalised this month. While we searched for the right candidates, Chris led the team through the very unpredictable circumstances we find ourselves in because of COVID-19. I would like to wish Chris all the best as he embarks on his new role, and to assure him that the ANZ team will always be his first home at Hitachi Vantara."

George Dragatsis is Drieberg's replacement as CTO and director of pre-sales at Hitachi Vantara ANZ.

He joins the company from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where he served as national pre-sales manager for data and storage optimisation.

Dragatsis previously spent five years as a solution architect and systems engineer at Nimble Storage, three years at Data#3 as a Cisco datacentre specialist, a year at Bridge IT Systems as an enterprise architect, and six years as a solution architect and technical consultant at Dimension Data.

Earlier in his career he held a variety of hands-on roles at Westfield, Tryton Engineering, Solution Consultants, and Enginuity.

Dragatsis holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Sydney.

"George likes to use the term 'technical thuggery' in describing his passion for building technical expertise and capability," said Johnson.

"His focus on people and technology is immediately evident. His passion is clearly driven by a customer obsessed-customer first-customer only attitude. It gives me great pleasure to welcome George Dragatsis to Hitachi Vantara ANZ."

Hitachi Vantara ANZ's other recent appointment is that of Mark Turner as southern region sales director.

He joins the company from Rackspace where he worked as southern region sales manager.

Turner has also held sales management positions at Datacom, Dimension Data, and Meta Group

He replaces Altay Ayyuce, who left the business in March for another role.

"I am excited to welcome someone of Mark Turner's experience and capability to our business," said Johnson.

"His wealth of experience centred on driving business transformation through technology innovation and his client-first focus will be of enormous benefit to our business, and those of our partners and customers, as we enter the 2nd half of FY20."