Continent 8 Names Mike Small as CEO as Founder Michael Tobin Moves to Chairman

A carefully staged handover at one of iGaming’s most embedded infrastructure providers – and a quiet signal about where the roadmap heads next.

Continent 8 Technologies has appointed Mike Small as Chief Executive Officer, effective 15 July 2026. Founder Michael Tobin, who has led the company for 28 years, moves into the role of Chairman. It’s an executive change at a business most players have never heard of – and one a surprising number of regulated operators depend on every day. That’s what makes it worth a closer look.

Why the Continent 8 CEO change matters now

Continent 8 doesn’t run a casino or take a bet. It runs the plumbing. Since its founding in 1998, the company has grown into a network of more than 100 connected data centres across four continents and over 30 US states, delivering infrastructure, cloud, cybersecurity, connectivity and managed services to a large slice of the licensed iGaming market.

That position changes the stakes of a leadership change. When the CEO of a game studio departs, the fallout is mostly the studio’s. When the CEO changes at the layer operators run on, the people paying attention are compliance officers and platform managers – the ones whose uptime, latency and security posture ride on that vendor holding steady.

What the leadership change actually involves

Small isn’t an outside hire parachuting in cold. He spent the past year as a Strategic Board Advisor to Continent 8, working alongside the executive team before taking the top job. That matters. A year of runway inside the business removes much of the usual first-90-days uncertainty.

His track record is in scaling technology and managed-services businesses at size. He was President of Akkodis North America and US Country President of The Adecco Group, where he helped advance the group’s AI strategy. Before that he was CEO – Americas at Sitel Group, with earlier senior roles at IBM, Hewlett Packard, Capgemini, and VXI & SYMBIO Global Solutions. More than 25 years, most of it in exactly the kind of infrastructure-and-services work Continent 8 sells. He’ll be based in Miami.

The operator read

Here’s the part operators care about. Leadership stability at the infrastructure layer isn’t a soft, nice-to-have factor – it feeds directly into service continuity, security decisions and roadmap. A messy transition at a core vendor is the sort of thing that ends up on a risk register.

Continent 8 has visibly worked to avoid that. The advisory year, the founder staying on as Chairman, the internal familiarity – this reads as a planned succession, not a scramble. Tobin was direct about the intent: “This transition has been thoughtfully planned, and I have complete confidence in Mike’s ability to lead the company into its next chapter.” Read past the courtesy and the signal to customers is continuity. For an operator weighing infrastructure partners, that’s a point in the column, not a reason to shop around.

The caveat worth naming

Planned or not, a founder handover after 28 years is still a real inflection point. Tobin was the company for nearly three decades. Culture, key relationships and long-standing customer trust don’t transfer on an effective date; they’re tested over the following year. The advisory runway and the Chairman role are sensible hedges, but they’re hedges – the proof is in how the business holds its customers and its people through 2026 and beyond.

Future outlook

Watch the AI thread. Small built part of his reputation on advancing AI strategy inside large managed-services organisations, and Continent 8 has been expanding its own Intelligence portfolio – managed AI services, AI-ready infrastructure and related lines. His appointment points, on the evidence of his background, toward continued investment there, alongside the stated focus on global expansion and deeper customer partnerships. In his own words, Small said he looks forward to helping the team “deepen customer partnerships, accelerate innovation, and continue delivering the secure, resilient, and high-performance solutions our customers depend on.” The direction is set. The next 12 months will show the pace.

Source: Continent 8 Technologies