After four years at the helm, Gary Jay Brooks is stepping down as CEO of CloudAccess.net and Jonathan James Gafill is stepping up to fill the position. Gary did a fantastic job as CEO and was pivotal to our success in our formative years. He will continue to help guide the company as owner/founder.

A career entrepreneur, Gary founded CloudAccess.net as MichiganMedia.net in 2008, a webdesign firm in Indian River, Michigan. In 2009 Gary became an active volunteer in the Joomla community and proposed the idea of a 30 day demo trial (hosted for free in cloud) to Open Source Matters (OSM). OSM put out a public RFP, and CloudAccess.net won the contract in April of 2010 over other larger companies like GoDaddy and Rackspace. Over the next four years Gary served as CEO, watching the company grow to host over 20,000 websites with more than 30 employees in 4 offices worldwide. More importantly, his idea for expanding the demo program put Joomla into the hands of many people who otherwise might not have been exposed to the CMS.

Prior to becoming CEO, Jonathan James Gafill served as Chief Operating Officer for the company and played an important role in shaping CloudAccess.net for close to 3 years. Originally joining the team as Project Manager in 2011, Jonathan successfully oversaw CloudAccess.net Professional Services before becoming Support Team Manager. It wasn’t long before Jonathan had a hand in managing many different departments at CloudAccess.net. Being an integral part of the team for many years, Jonathan was the natural choice to take over as CEO.

Gary comments that, “I hired Jonathan in October of 2011 and he sat by my side for 2 years, shadowing me and learning about what it takes to captain this ship. He’s going to make a great CEO and I know he’ll keep a culture of excellence going in the company. I also think he has the vision needed to maneuver and position CloudAccess.net for great success in the future.”