SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 23, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Cloudscaling today named Michael Grant, an early cloud pioneer and veteran product strategist, as CEO. Grant's selection sets the stage for the company's next phase of growth.
Grant brings substantial expertise in leading cloud technologies to market. He served as CEO of Ejasent, a provider of software for server resource management and data center cost management. He led the company's growth and subsequent acquisition by Veritas in 2004. Grant was also CEO and co-founder of Redmojo, a heterogeneous virtualization management company which later became the core of PlateSpin Orchestrate after Redmojo was acquired by Novell in 2007.
Co-Founder Randy Bias led the search that brought Grant to Cloudscaling. "Michael has successfully led early cloud companies and has a proven ability to bring disruptive technologies to market," said Bias, who shifts roles to CTO, while remaining co-founder and chairman. "With this critical part of our leadership plan in place, I can focus on leading the architecture of our technology platform and the expansion of our engineering team."
Grant's early career was formed by a series of product management and senior marketing roles at Sun Microsystems and Apple, as well as Relevance and Documentum, which are now part of EMC. He also served as an executive in residence at Red Rock Ventures. Since the acquisition of Redmojo, Grant has advised various venture-backed web application and infrastructure start-ups on business strategies, customer development, go-to-market plans and fundraising. He holds a B.A. in Business Economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
"It's an honor to join a proven team with a clear vision and significant market traction. Similarly, it's rare when a CEO arrives to find such an impressive portfolio of customer wins," said Grant. "Cloudscaling has launched four large service provider clouds in the past nine months with an expanding pipeline of new customer opportunities. We have a fantastic engineering team that continues to find creative and patentable solutions to IaaS technical challenges. The stage is set for the some exciting product developments later in the year."
Adam Waters, co-founder and COO said, "When Randy and I began building the company, we planned for the time when Cloudscaling would be ready for a CEO with Michael's level of experience. His background and experience in product development, strategic marketing, and managing high growth startups will accelerate Cloudscaling's plans while letting Randy and I focus on what we do best: developing customer and partner relationships, expanding the team, and continuing to establish thought leadership."
Cloudscaling builds the world's largest clouds for service providers, governments, and enterprises. Clients choose Cloudscaling because our clouds are compatible with industry leaders, while offering equal or better performance and economics. We deliver this via an open platform that frees our clients from vendor lock-in. The Cloudscaling team is comprised of cloud veterans and pioneers from industry leading companies such as Amazon, GoGrid, RightScale, Opscode, Canonical, Ejasent, Reductive Labs, Engine Yard, VMWare, and Microsoft. The company's leadership frequently speaks at the world's most prominent cloud computing conferences and forums. cloudscaling.com
SOURCE Cloudscaling
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