There is a clean way to tell Brooks Borcherding's career: begin in 1988, move through a sequence of increasingly senior jobs, mark three company sales, and arrive at Pythian, where he is chief executive and a director. The more revealing version is about timing. Borcherding has spent almost four decades turning up near moments when enterprise technology changes its basic shape. Each time, the nouns are different. The operator's questions are much the same.
At Avaya, the shift involved call centers and global communications. At Cisco, voice and data were converging. At Navisite, infrastructure was becoming a service before “cloud” settled into the everyday business vocabulary. LiveAction sat close to the rise of software-defined wide-area networking. Cloudreach helped companies navigate the hyperscalers. Pythian's present work is data and artificial intelligence. The common thread is not a devotion to one product. It is a habit of finding the place where a technical capability is about to become an operating requirement.
A career measured in market turns
Borcherding left Virginia Tech with a Bachelor of Science in 1988 and began at Andersen Consulting. From there he moved into a long run at Avaya and its predecessor organization, first in information technology and account work, then in international leadership. Cisco followed in 2005. By the time Navisite recruited him in 2009, he had seen enterprise systems from several angles: the internal technology function, the customer account, the regional business, and the vendor selling through a broad partner ecosystem.
Navisite was the hinge. Borcherding joined as senior vice president of sales and chief revenue officer, became president, and then took the CEO duties. The company was narrowing its focus to hosting and managed services. In public remarks, he later placed Navisite among the early infrastructure-as-a-service builders of 2009. Two years later, Time Warner Cable bought the company. Borcherding stayed within the larger organization and eventually ran enterprise and carrier sales.
That sequence became a template, though never an exact copy. He moved to Datto as chief revenue officer in late 2015, taking responsibility across sales, marketing, and business development. His language there was practical and channel-minded: teach managed service providers how to build recurring-revenue businesses, give them useful content and tools, and lower the friction between a product and the customer who needs it. Vista Equity Partners acquired Datto in 2017 and combined it with Autotask.
At LiveAction, first as president and then as CEO, he went after another transition. SD-WAN promised to change how enterprises deployed and managed wide-area networks. Borcherding's first priorities were the go-to-market functions he knew best: sales, marketing, strategic partnerships, and the large reseller ecosystem around Cisco. He was not selling novelty for its own sake. He was connecting a new architecture to the routes through which enterprise technology is actually discovered, bought, deployed, and supported.
Three exits, without the victory lap
The third transaction came at Cloudreach. Borcherding joined the multi-cloud specialist as chief operating officer in 2019 and became CEO. In 2021, Atos agreed to acquire the business. At the announcement, Cloudreach employed more than 600 people, held more than 1,000 certifications across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, and expected about EUR100 million in annual revenue. The deal closed in 2022.
Transactions make neat milestones because they have dates and press releases. Operating is messier. It is the stretch between those moments: choosing which demand is durable, convincing a board to invest, keeping customers served, and giving employees a reason to believe the work will matter. Borcherding's account of leading Cloudreach through the disruption of 2020 shows that less polished layer. He described making an early choice to hold the company's footing, preserve its team, and recruit talent while others were cutting. It went against the easy reflex of the moment.
“Create your own luck.”Brooks Borcherding on his approach to work
His productivity system is not a system at all. He calls it hard work. The phrase he uses is “create your own luck,” meaning sustained effort applied before an opening becomes obvious. Turn over every rock. Prepare the organization. Do not reach the end of a market window wondering whether the team left something untried. It is an unfashionably sturdy philosophy, especially in an industry fond of shortcuts.
Spot the inflection point early. Then translate it into ordinary work: the right partners, trained people, usable data, clear measures, and a customer problem worth solving.
The people side matters just as much. At Cloudreach, Borcherding described a leadership objective that had little to do with an exit: create exceptional opportunities for hundreds of employees. He wanted people to leave after a meaningful chapter able to say they had stretched, done strong work, and shared it with colleagues they respected. A company could be a place where somebody did a portion of their life's work, even if neither the company nor the employee expected permanence.
AI, stripped of magic
Borcherding arrived at Pythian in June 2024. The appointment returned him to a familiar setting: a services company with deep technical credentials, a private-equity owner, an important platform partnership, and a market crossing from experimentation into adoption. Pythian had built its reputation over decades in databases, analytics, cloud, and managed services. Its close relationship with Google Cloud gave the company a clear lane into generative AI.
His AI thesis is notably unromantic. Better models create more demand for clean, governed, accessible data. Employees need help applying tools to their daily work. Companies need change management, not only licenses. Pythian is using Gemini internally, encouraging employees to create agents and rethink workflows, while also applying AI to managed services tasks such as ticket responses, common requests, and infrastructure improvement. The point is not to bolt an AI label onto the old operation. It is to inspect how the operation moves.
Google Workspace services - reported year-over-year index
Indexed illustration of the 175% year-over-year growth Borcherding reported in 2026. He attributed it to change management and accelerated Gemini deployment around Workspace.
The numbers suggest that the supporting work is becoming a business in its own right. In early 2026, Borcherding said Pythian's Google Workspace services revenue had grown 175 percent year over year. He tied the increase to change management around Gemini adoption and faster deployments, not to a single breakthrough demonstration. The mundane work of helping thousands of employees use a tool can be more valuable than the initial moment of surprise.
A year earlier, Pythian had reported more than 20 opportunities around Google's enterprise search and agent platform in roughly a month. The attraction was straightforward: connect existing information in systems such as Slack and Salesforce, then make it useful through an AI interface. In April 2025, Pythian also received Google Cloud's Databases Partner of the Year award for North America. The recognition suited Borcherding's argument. If AI is the visible new layer, databases remain part of the load-bearing structure.
“AI is going to drive data hygiene.”Brooks Borcherding, speaking about Pythian's 2026 strategy
There is a lesson here that travels beyond Pythian. A technology transition creates two markets at once. One belongs to the new capability. The other belongs to all the unfinished work the capability exposes. Generative AI reveals scattered data, inconsistent permissions, vague processes, and employees who have been given access without a useful path to adoption. The better the model looks, the harder those organizational gaps are to ignore.
The records he plays all the way through
The personal clues in Borcherding's public conversations fit the professional pattern without feeling engineered for it. His favorite novel is Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, which he read before the film series arrived. What caught him was the translation of emerging science into a story perched near possibility. The book asks what happens when a technical threshold is crossed and human systems fail to keep pace. It is easy to see why that would appeal to someone whose career depends on recognizing thresholds.
His music taste runs toward complete classic-rock albums. Pink Floyd is a favorite, especially Animals, The Wall, and The Dark Side of the Moon. He has spoken with amused pride about his children discovering Pink Floyd, the Beatles, and 1980s rock for themselves. The detail is small but telling: he still values the long arc, the sequence, the way individual pieces gain force when stitched together.
He has studied leaders the same way. From Cisco's John Chambers, he took the force of a customer-first culture reinforced until employees felt authorized to act on it. He admired Steve Jobs for making a technology presentation feel personal. At Datto, working with founder Austin McChord offered another kind of education: a young CEO communicating with and motivating a workforce close to his own generation. Borcherding's leadership vocabulary is assembled from observation, not a single school of management.
The next opening
Pythian gives Borcherding a concentrated version of the opportunity he has chased for years. The company sits where databases, cloud platforms, managed services, and AI meet. Google supplies an expanding technical stack. Customers supply messy estates and urgent expectations. Pythian's job is to close the distance between the two, while Borcherding's job is to make that work repeatable enough to grow.
The strategy for 2026 is an AI-first mentality across the company. That includes helping employees build agents, improving internal productivity, and using AI inside service delivery. It also means preserving the older capabilities that make the new ones useful. Data engineering and analytics are not yesterday's business. They are pulled forward by every AI project that discovers its inputs are not ready.
Borcherding once said the advice he would give his younger self was to be aggressive and bold, take the opportunity, and cherish the achievements along the way. That last clause keeps the mantra from becoming mere hustle. A career is not only a race to the next inflection point. It is also a collection of teams, records played with children, lessons borrowed from other leaders, and stretches of work worth remembering.
AI will produce plenty of spectacle. Borcherding's bet is on the supporting structure: the clean data, the changed behavior, the partner motion, the person who learns to rebuild a workflow, and the company prepared before demand arrives. It is the sort of bet he has made before. The technology changes. The operator keeps asking what must become true next.