Opscode Taps Likewise CEO as Vice President, Enterprise

SEATTLE, March 18, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Opscode^®, the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that Barry Crist has been appointed Vice President, Enterprise, to lead the company's enterprise strategy and execution amidst rapid growth of the Opscode Chef™ platform.  Crist will report directly to Opscode CEO Mitch Hill, and will be responsible for further accelerating enterprise adoption of Opscode's open source and commercial solutions, including Chef, Hosted Chef™ and Private Chef™. Prior to joining Opscode, Mr. Crist was most recently CEO of Likewise, Inc. where he built an open source, free-to-premium sales model that reached more than 100,000 organizations worldwide. Likewise was acquired by EMC Isilon in September 2012. Prior to Likewise, Mr. Crist served as Vice President of the Application Management group at Mercury, now a division of HP, where he grew North American sales from less than $1 million to more than $75 million in annual revenue.

"Barry is a proven leader with a long track record of enabling enterprise customer success with both open source and DevOps software solutions," said Mitch Hill, CEO, Opscode. "As the Global 10,000 increasingly adopt IT automation to accelerate their business, Barry gives us an ideal combination of leadership, deep expertise, and relevant market experience to maximize the enterprise market opportunity for Opscode."

"I'm ecstatic to join Opscode during such an exciting period in both the company's growth and a major shift in the IT landscape," said Crist. "Opscode has the opportunity to capitalize on the enterprise shift toward DevOps and infrastructure automation and become a significant force in the software industry."

Most recently, Mr. Crist worked as an 'Executive-in-Residence' at Ignition Partners. Prior to his time at Mercury Interactive, Mr. Crist spent time in sales leadership at Network Associates (now McAfee) and technical, sales, and international roles at Apple.

About Opscode Chef
Opscode Chef is an open-source systems integration framework available for download and easy installation in physical, virtual or cloud infrastructures. Chef delivers a flexible model for reuse, enabling users to easily and consistently configure and deploy infrastructure as code across any operating system from Windows to Unix and Linux. Chef simplifies systems management and reduces operating risk through easy, reusable 'recipes' and 'cookbooks' of code-based configuration and deployment commands for resources, services and applications. Chef is available as an open source download, a SaaS subscription, or as software installed behind the user's firewall.

About Opscode
Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. Opscode helps companies of all sizes develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale easily and predictably; can be quickly rebuilt in any environment; and save developers and systems engineers time and money. Opscode's team is comprised of web infrastructure experts responsible for building and operating some of the world's largest websites and cloud computing platforms. More information can be found at www.opscode.com.

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SOURCE Opscode