Aziz Benmalek

CEO and Board Director Aeris

Last Reviewed: September 29, 2026

Executive Summary

Aziz Benmalek is CEO and a board director of Aeris, a cellular IoT company that provides connectivity management, security and connected-vehicle platforms to enterprises, device makers and mobile operators. He took the role in February 2025 after a career spent almost entirely in large software businesses: more than two decades at Microsoft, where he built its worldwide cloud services and hosting organization, followed by channel leadership at Splunk and the presidency of Sage North America. At Aeris he has pushed an AI-first agenda across both internal operations and the product, work that earned him a place on Channel Insider’s 2026 AI 50. He also sits on the board of Sylogist, a TSX-listed public-sector and nonprofit software company.

Career Highlights

• Appointed CEO and board director of Aeris on 18 February 2025, taking over a platform serving 7,000 enterprise customers, 30 mobile operator partners and more than 80 million IoT devices in nearly 200 countries.
• Named to Channel Insider’s 2026 AI 50 for deploying AI agents across Aeris and bringing agentic AI to connected-vehicle and IoT ecosystems.
• President of Sage North America before joining Aeris.
• Vice president and channel chief for worldwide indirect sales, partners and business development at Splunk.
• Spent 22 years at Microsoft, where as vice president of worldwide cloud services and hosting he helped create an organization that grew into a $4 billion business.
• Independent director of Sylogist Ltd. since June 2024, re-elected in May 2026.

Professional Journey

Benmalek trained as an engineer, earning a Master of Engineering from Ecole Centrale Paris, and added an MBA from ESCP Business School. The bulk of his career was at Microsoft, where he spent 22 years. The role Aeris singles out is vice president of worldwide cloud services and hosting, an organization he was instrumental in creating and growing into a $4 billion business: in effect, Microsoft’s route to market through the hosting and service-provider partners who resold its cloud.

That partner-led background carried into his next role, at Splunk, as vice president and channel chief responsible for worldwide indirect sales, partners and business development. He then became president of Sage North America, running the regional business of the accounting and business-management software company.

In June 2024 he joined the board of Sylogist, a Calgary-based, TSX-listed provider of ERP, CRM and related software for nonprofits, education and government. The company describes him as a SaaS executive with more than 25 years of experience building and scaling businesses across cloud and SaaS, and shareholders re-elected him in May 2026.

Aeris named him CEO and board director in February 2025, with Marc Jones, who remained board chair, serving as co-CEO through the transition. Aeris is one of the older names in machine-to-machine connectivity. It built its own cellular network for M2M communications, and its 2023 acquisition of Ericsson’s IoT Accelerator platform substantially enlarged the business. Its customers and partners include operators such as Orange, KDDI, Verizon and Swisscom and automotive groups including Mitsubishi Motors and Volkswagen Group of America. Benmalek set out three priorities on arrival: expanding the company’s reach, adding value-added services to the IoT Accelerator platform, and improving the connected-vehicle experience. By 2026 the company was describing its direction in terms of physical AI. It had deployed multi-agent systems internally for root-cause analysis across network, vehicle and application layers, and was working to bring agentic AI to the connected devices it manages.

Education

Ecole Centrale Paris

Master of Engineering

ESCP Business School (European Business School)

MBA