Univa UD Appoints New Management Team, Unveils New Data Center Automation Strategy

Univa UD, a provider of data center automation and virtualization products, recently announced it has named industry veterans Alex Brown and Kent Purdy to lead its data center automation business division and retool its product suite. The announcement comes as Univa UD officially launches Reliance as its cornerstone product for service-based management of application delivery environments.

Brown joins Univa UD as VP and general manager of data center automation. Brown brings 20 years of experience and a wealth of enterprise software and data center strategy expertise to Univa UD. He joins the company from Dell, where he was the global leader in charge of developing Infrastructure Services solutions, most recently including Dell’s initial Virtualization and Data Center Power/Cooling offerings.

During his time at Dell, Brown also ran Asia-Pacific-Japan Consulting as well as his initial post at Dell leading Central United States Consulting. His previous firm, Plural, was acquired by Dell in 2002.

Also joining Univa UD is Kent Purdy, who will lead product development for the data center automation division. Purdy also brings more than 20 years experience in the business software industry, maintaining product focus specific to IT centric administration and management solutions for servers, distributed computing, and grid environments.

Purdy joins Univa UD from Altiris, where as senior product alliance manager he drove product strategy into partner roadmap and execution plans. At Altiris, Purdy managed Dell’s OpenManage product line, including Dell’s Client Manager for desktop and mobile management as well as their Dell Management Console server management platform. Purdy has also held lead product management positions at Platform Computing, Novell, and Citrix.

Univa UD at the same time officially launched its data center automation business, anchored by its Reliance product for service-level management of application delivery environments. Univa UD plans to release a major upgrade for Reliance in Q3 2008 including key partner integrations.