Virtela Extends Cloud Momentum with New CEO and World's First Open Acceleration Service for Public Clouds

DENVER, Jan. 26, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

Key Takeaways:

• Jagadeesh brings proven record of innovating and leading successful market transitions
• New Cloud Accelerator service extends Virtela Enterprise Services Cloud (ESC) benefits to applications hosted in public clouds, such as Amazon EC2
• Company's cloud-based application acceleration service, introduced last year, achieves strong adoption and business results from customers

Virtela, the world's largest independent managed network, security and cloud services company, announced today that highly regarded business leader and industry visionary B.V. Jagadeesh has joined as president and chief executive officer as the company builds upon its continued growth. Jagadeesh comes to Virtela with a proven record of building and managing IT market leaders, and is best known for spearheading major market transitions such as the Web Hosting and Application Delivery markets.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110126/LA36472)

"I've witnessed a number of transformative market shifts throughout my career and I believe we are at the very beginning of another such market shift: the evolution of advanced IT services moving to the cloud, just as applications and compute/storage moved in the last decade," said Jagadeesh. "Virtela's worldwide IP assets and market opportunity are very exciting and the people behind Virtela's high quality service delivery to Fortune 1000 customers make it even more attractive to drive the company to the next level. I believe Virtela is perfectly positioned to become the leader in delivering the next generation of advanced IT services from the cloud."

Prior to joining Virtela, Jagadeesh served as group vice president and general manager of Citrix Systems' Application Networking Group after the company's acquisition of NetScaler, where he served as president and CEO. During his tenure at NetScaler, Jagadeesh grew the company into the market leader in Application Delivery, leading to its acquisition by Citrix for $325 million.

Jagadeesh previously co-founded Exodus Communications and grew the company from start-up to the pioneer and leader in Web co-location and hosting, and was instrumental in leading its highly successful initial public offering (IPO).  He serves as chairman of the board of NetMagic Solutions, a leading IT services company in India, and was a director of Ankeena (acquired by Juniper Networks) and Ocarina Networks (acquired by Dell).  

"Virtela has achieved critical mass across the board – in revenue, scale and profitability – and now is the opportune time to scale even further via new services that leverage the company's unique global cloud architecture," added Promod Haque, Virtela chairman and managing partner of Norwest Venture Partners. "Jagadeesh brings an ideal background and complementary strengths to Virtela from his leadership positions and innovation at companies such as Citrix, Netscaler and Exodus, which directly enhance Virtela's cloud services strategy and execution."

For more thoughts from B.V. Jagadeesh upon joining Virtela, view the video.

Seizing the Market Opportunity: Virtela Cloud Accelerator

In tandem with the appointment of Jagadeesh, Virtela continues to take advantage of the growing market opportunity to provide cloud-based IT infrastructure services beyond applications, compute and storage.  

Building upon the launch of Virtela Enterprise Services Cloud (ESC) – the industry's first cloud services platform purpose-built for enterprise networking, security and mobility –  and the first cloud-based application acceleration service, Virtela is today introducing the Cloud Accelerator service. Cloud Accelerator extends Virtela ESC's acceleration benefits to applications hosted within the public cloud environment, such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, and IBM Cloudburst.

With the addition of Cloud Accelerator, Virtela offers the industry's broadest set of application acceleration services optimized for any customer environment and deployable from public or private clouds, data centers, remote offices, as well as hybrid cloud and premises-based solutions.

Because Cloud Accelerator operates independent of the underlying hypervisor platform, enterprises gain the ability to accelerate applications hosted at nearly any public cloud provider. Deployed as virtual instances at both the public cloud computing facility and Virtela ESC globally, Cloud Accelerator provides performance improvements of 5x-25x and is backed by the same industry-first application response time guarantee the company introduced with the launch of Virtela ESC: If customers do not experience faster response times, they do not pay – and Virtela will pay them 250% of their service charge.

Unlike other cloud-based IT service approaches, Virtela ESC offers a breakthrough open architecture that is both vendor-agnostic and multi-service (network, security and mobility), as well as available around the world via 50 Virtela Local Cloud Centers (LCC), eliminating customers' needs to acquire and manage multiple branch office and data center infrastructure devices.

The new service – as well as Virtela ESC overall – addresses the growing enterprise trend of migrating targeted applications and workloads to the public cloud, as companies seek to increasingly migrate their IT investment model from capex to opex.

"Over time, the net effect of cloud adoption will be a transformation of traditional software and hardware market segments into IT services," according to Forrester Research. "Provider-hosted offerings will gradually replace data volume and compute power in corporate data centers and on personal devices." (1)

Customer Success: Virtela Cloud Application Acceleration Service

Since its launch, Virtela's application acceleration service has garnered strong adoption from customers who are exploiting its significant cost and performance improvements at sites around the world.

QAD, a leading developer of enterprise applications for global manufacturing companies, is experiencing the core business benefits of Virtela's cloud-based application acceleration as part of the broad cloud computing initiative it started several years ago.  

"QAD has been an early adopter of cloud services, and we're impressed and excited about Virtela's vision to offer more services from the cloud," said Leif Petersen, Chief Information Officer for QAD. "Virtela's cloud-based application acceleration service has improved our application performance and file transfer times by 5-to-15x and is an order of magnitude less costly and time intensive than the other vendors and hardware-based approaches we evaluated.

"Looking ahead, we're eager to achieve similar benefits from our public cloud-based assets – even to support delivery of our own ERP application to customers.  Aside from their cloud service innovation, Virtela's customer support and personal engagement are far superior to anything we've experienced in the past."

About Virtela

Virtela Technology Services Incorporated is the world's largest independent managed network, security and cloud services company. Virtela offers an award-winning suite of services – including managed networks, security, application acceleration and proactive infrastructure management – to midmarket and Fortune 500 customers around the world. Virtela offers unparalleled geographic reach to more than 190 countries through its partnerships with more than 500 carriers.

Virtela is headquartered in Denver, Colorado, with globally distributed Network Operations Centers in the U.S., India and the Philippines. For more information, please call +1 (720) 475-4000 or visit www.virtela.net.

(1) "The Evolution Of Cloud Computing Markets," Forrester Research, Inc., July 6, 2010.

SOURCE Virtela Technology Services Incorporated