Munich, 20th May, 2010 – ABBYY Europe, a member of the ABBYY Group and a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic software, today announced the appointment of Andrew Clayton as its new European Sales Director for Retail and OEM. Andrew’s responsibilities in this new position will be the distribution of the ABBYY desktop products in Western Europe as well as the close cooperation with corporate clients and hardware manufacturers.

Since 2008, Andrew has been the ABBYY Sales Manager for German-speaking regions.  In the new role he will be responsible for the distribution of all ABBYY desktop products including FineReader, PDF Transformer, FotoReader and Lingvo. The new position consolidates ABBYY’s presence throughout Europe, not only in the traditional retail channel, but also in online and corporate sales. 

“ABBYY has seen rapid growth for our desktop software products in the last few years in the European market”, said Michael Ziegler, Vice President of Sales, ABBYY Europe GmbH. “Thanks to a consolidated strategy for all distribution channels throughout Western Europe, we are achieving our goals of strengthening our retail channel and growing the ABBYY brand.”

Andrew Clayton has spent his professional career working in various well-known technology companies and has gained an extensive knowledge about the IT software industry. He possesses special know-how in the education, government and corporate sales areas as well as a deep understanding of German-speaking regions and Central Europe. During his professional career, dating back to 1996, he has been responsible for software solutions sales across distribution as well as specialised retailers, licensing and OEM partner support.

For more information about ABBYY and ABBYY products, please visit: http://abbyy.com/.