Highlight Appoints New CEO as Observability Demand Surges in APAC
Highlight restructures leadership with new CEO as APAC observability market accelerates to $1.4B by 2030. Tool sprawl drives consolidation demand across Asia Pacific enterprises.
Observability platform provider Highlight has restructured its leadership team, appointing Martin Saunders as Chief Executive Officer while founder Richard Thomas transitions to Chairman. The company also named four new department heads to strengthen its operational structure as the Asia Pacific observability market accelerates toward $1.4 billion by 2030.
Leadership Expansion Reflects Market Maturation
The restructuring includes Mia Worthington as Head of Product, Peter Savereux as Head of Marketing, Justin Holsgrove as Head of Technical Quality and Assurance, and Craig Smith as Head of Customer Success. This organizational shift separates governance from day-to-day execution, positioning specialized leaders to address distinct operational priorities.
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Saunders highlighted strong momentum entering 2026, with multiple new partner contracts signed globally. The leadership changes support growth objectives across platform development, marketing, delivery quality, and customer outcomes. Highlight's managed service observability platform collects and analyzes network and IT infrastructure data, targeting managed service providers and enterprise IT teams through a partner-led sales model.
Thomas, who founded Highlight in 1999, emphasized alignment with industry trends, noting that "managed services must be more about the service than the technology." The company has collaborated with vendors including Cisco to refine its MSP proposition, understanding competitive pressures where service delivery and customer relationships serve as critical differentiation points.
Regional Tool Sprawl Drives Organizational Change
The leadership restructuring reflects broader market dynamics across Asia Pacific, where 61% of firms use five or more observability tools, significantly higher than global averages. This tool sprawl creates urgent demand for platform consolidation, with 36% to 48% of APAC and ASEAN enterprises planning unification within the next year.
India leads the region with 72% of enterprises using multiple observability tools, while South Korea follows at 70%. The Asia Pacific observability market reached $608.9 million in 2023 and is projected to grow to $1.4 billion by 2030 at a 13.3% annual growth rate, making it the fastest-growing region globally.
Japan represents the highest individual market growth at 23.9% annually, with market value reaching $105 million in 2025. The region's median annual outage costs of $19.07 million, the highest globally, compel enterprises to invest in proactive incident prevention.
Enterprise Priorities Shape Organizational Design
The appointment of specialized department heads addresses distinct enterprise requirements across the region. Worthington's product leadership role navigates hybrid deployment models, the fastest-growing deployment mode at 20.12% annual growth, driven by data sovereignty requirements and regulatory constraints.
Savereux's marketing position addresses diverse regional drivers, with 60% of APAC firms citing security as a primary observability priority, followed by IoT adoption at 57% and AI integration at 56%. India leads in AI and business application drivers at 51%, while ASEAN excels in deploying 10 or more observability capabilities.
Holsgrove's technical quality role addresses detection and resolution challenges, particularly relevant as South Korea demonstrates 114% median ROI despite having the slowest mean time to detect incidents in the region. Smith's customer success position reflects the consultative approach required as managed observability services emerge as the fastest-growing segment, addressing skill shortages and cost optimization needs.
The solutions segment accounts for 72% of the global observability market in 2025, with major vendors including Broadcom, Dynatrace, IBM, Microsoft, Riverbed Technology, and Splunk competing across the region. As 26% to 34% of APAC enterprises cite tool sprawl as the primary barrier to full-stack observability, specialized leadership structures enable vendors to guide consolidation strategies and maximize platform value for enterprise accounts.
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