Press releases

Avast Appoints Vita Santrucek to GM of SMB Business

New General Manager will expand Avast Business services in cloud and network security

New General Manager will expand Avast Business services in cloud and network security


Prague, Czech Republic & Redwood City, California, July 18, 2019 – Avast (LSE:AVST), announced the appointment of Vita Santrucek to General Manager of Avast Business effective immediately. In his new role, Mr. Santrucek will join the Avast executive leadership team and deepen his focus on building out excellence in Avast Business products through engineering, product management, and operations as Avast Business continues to expand its network security product and services portfolio, first launched earlier in 2019.

Vita Santrucek said, “This has been a watershed year for Avast Business as we defined our small and mid-size business strategy to focus tightly on security, which is our core expertise as a company. We have begun the journey to cloud security with the launch of Avast Secure Web Gateway in March and bolstered our endpoint protection portfolio with Avast Patch Management. We have a packed agenda for the rest of this year expanding these services and building out our partner base.”

Vita Santrucek joined Avast in 2018 as Vice President, Engineering, and immediately became a critical member of the Avast Business team. He is promoted to the role of GM following the retirement of Kevin Chapman who previously led Avast Business through the integration process after the major acquisition of AVG Technologies in 2016. Mr. Santrucek has 20 years’ experience at companies including Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and has repeatedly proven the value of his deep experience in leading Big Data, IoT, and Java development teams over the past two years.

Mr. Santrucek’s former role will be split as part of the Avast Business strategic re-focus on pure security, with Michal Trs promoted to Senior Engineering Director and Tomas Motal appointed Quality and Technical Support Director. Together, they will be responsible for ensuring the alignment of engineering with technical support to enhance the experience of Avast Business partners and customers across user feedback, speed of response and quality of service.

Mr. Trs has been an engineering team lead in Avast Business for the last three years and previously lead projects in the Avast Viruslab Systems division. Mr. Motal previously managed technical support and quality control for Avast Business, and has an extensive background in product and technical development at small and enterprise-sized IT companies. Both are graduates of the Czech Technical University in Prague.