Acer Chairman's Son to Lead Cloud Business Unit

Acer Inc. appointed Maverick Shih, Acer Chairman Stan Shih's eldest son, the general manager of its BYOC (Build-Your-Own-Cloud) and tablet business unit in the company's latest wave of new appointments and restructuring.

Maverick was the marketing executive of the company's cloud-technology business group since the unit was opened around two years ago after Acer acquired American cloud-technology company, iGware.

Born in 1973 and with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, Maverick is considered by some industry executives to be groomed to take over from Stan Shih, the founder of Acer.

Acer recently renamed the business group in line with its recent announcement that BYOC will guide its new direction and vision.

To facilitate the company's BYOC business, Acer has recruited Jason Chen, the former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) executive in charge of global marketing, as chief executive officer (CEO) and global president. Chen points out that Acer's new product projects will revolve around BYOC, and that Acer has three advantages in developing BYOC: its huge number of established data centers, the high reliability of its data security, and a huge number of successful cloud cases under Acer's belt.

Chen stressed that based on the BYOC plan, the company would rather sell software plus service than computing hardware so that consumers can build their personal clouds like music and photos on their personal computers and mobile computing devices.

The company's latest restructuring includes adding several business groups as the laptop computer business group, and fixed-point computing & display business group. Also, it has opened a global strategy planning & operation center after shuttering its global operation center for the enterprise market. (KL)