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Abicloud announced 1.0.0, funding, and a new CEO for Abiquo

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Abiquo , the Open Source Cloud company from Barcelona, has been busy the last couple of weeks. Last week they announced two important milestones in their existence.

First of all a round of 1.5M euro Series A funding was announced
€1 million comes from Nauta Capital, another 441.000 Euro comes from Caja Navarra
and another 100.000 Euro comes from their new CEO, Pete Malcolm .

The bio of their new CEO, Pete Malcom reads as follows “Pete joined Abiquo in 2009 to boost the international expansion of the Company, thanks to his extensive experience in making companies with a strong technical profile successful. He is a British serial entrepreneur and technologist, best known as the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Orchestria Corporation, which was acquired in January 2009 by CA Inc.. for an undisclosed sum. Previously, Pete was Benchmark Capital Europe’s first Entrepreneur In Residence, and prior to that, Senior Vice President of Business Management with CA. He is the inventor of more than 150 patents in the field of software.”

Abiquo lets us know that with this fresh money they will be able to strengthen the commercial efforts for their solutions on both national and international level.

Apart from the organizational updates Abiquo yesterday also announced the first formal release of abiCloud 1.0.0 together with this first formal release it has also changed it’s license from a
combination of the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and Common Public Attribution License (CAPL) to the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 3.

The change of license was inspired by simplicity, the community is much more at ease with a familiar license such as the LGPL for everything then with a mixture of 2 lesser known licenses for different modules.

Diego Mariño co-founder and VP Community Solutions at Abiquo says that the change to LGPL gives the community greater flexibility ““the LGPL license keeps the Cloud open and keeps the organizations that promote it in the black. Proprietary software can use abiCloud as a component without losing the proprietary nature of that software.”

With a couple of big key european players integrating abiCloud in their cloud strategy abiquo is set for growth.

AbiCloud is sill vendor neutral, providing concurrent support of all major hypervisors, as well industry standards such as the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

When asked how their product differentiates from the other open source cloud platform vendors there are two remarking features that stand out, they offer an impressive gui for their end users while not neglecting the skilled sysadmins by giving them a CLI that can connect with the API.

Secondly they claim really easy management of users, organisations , datacenter resources, virtual-datacenters and virtual apps. So easy that you can define a hierachy of resources and users rights in minutes .

AbiCloud 1.0.0 is available for immediate download at www.abicloud.org.

Former VMware Exec Jim Gannon Joins HyTrust as VP of Sales

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Former VMware Executive Joins HyTrust as Vice President of Sales
Mountain View, CA – February 23, 2010 – HyTrust (www.hytrust.com) today announced the appointment of Jim Gannon as vice president of Sales. Gannon is a seasoned executive with over 19 years of tenure at category-leading organizations such as VMware, EMC and General Electric (GE). He will leverage his experience in building high-performance sales teams to accelerate HyTrust’s penetration into the high-growth production virtualization market and extend the company’s leadership position.
“Jim is a proven industry veteran with an exceptional track record of shaping sales strategy and scaling top-performing sales teams,” said Eric Chiu, president and CEO of HyTrust. “His experience acquiring and developing strategic accounts will bring the benefits of HyTrust solutions to more customers striving to virtualize their production infrastructure.”
Gannon brings a background rich in sales, global account management and enterprise sales management, with the last thirteen years in information technology. He joins HyTrust from VMware, the world’s leading provider of virtualization solutions. As director of Global Accounts for VMware, he built a team that delivered 20 percent average annual revenue growth, and forged strong relationships with Fortune 50 companies in the financial services, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, information technology, and oil and gas industries. Prior to VMware, Gannon spent three years in Tokyo as director of EMC Japan in addition to other sales management positions there and at GE.
“Organizations have accelerated their virtualization efforts due to an increasing array of business drivers—capital and operating expense reduction, business agility, data center constraints, power exhaustion and, most notably, the advent of cloud computing—yet they have not implemented the appropriate controls to manage risk and meet compliance and/or corporate governance requirements,” said Gannon. “HyTrust is uniquely positioned to help organizations continue the journey to virtualize more, with its end-to-end security and compliance solution for virtual infrastructure. I am proud to be part of the team that will lead this emerging market.”
About HyTrust (www.hytrust.com)
HyTrust™ delivers Virtualization Under Control™. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, HyTrust is the leader in policy management and access control for virtual infrastructure. HyTrust Appliance empowers organizations to virtualize more–including servers that may be subject to compliance–by delivering enterprise-class controls for access and accountability, and visibility over the entire virtualization infrastructure. The Company is backed by top tier investors Trident Capital and Epic Ventures; its partners also include VMware, Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC), Citrix (Nasdaq: CTXS) and RSA (NYSE: EMC).

HyTrust today announced the appointment of Jim Gannon as vice president of Sales.

Gannon is a seasoned executive with over 19 years of tenure at organizations such as VMware, EMC and General Electric (GE). He will leverage his experience in building high-performance sales teams to accelerate HyTrust’s penetration into the high-growth production virtualization market and extend the company’s leadership position.

Gannon brings a background rich in sales, global account management and enterprise sales management, with the last thirteen years in information technology. He joins HyTrust from VMware, the world’s leading provider of virtualization solutions. As director of Global Accounts for VMware, he built a team that delivered 20 percent average annual revenue growth, and forged strong relationships with Fortune 50 companies in the financial services, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, information technology, and oil and gas industries. Prior to VMware, Gannon spent three years in Tokyo as director of EMC Japan in addition to other sales management positions there and at GE.

Virtualization Vet Dave Asprey Joins Trinity Ventures As EIR

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Dave Asprey has joined Trinity Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence. He previously was VP of technology and corporate development with Blue Coat Systems.

Asprey’s bio, from the Trinity Ventures website:

Dave has 17 plus years of experience working in strategic planning, product management, and corporate & business development. He has worked at service provider, telecom, networking, virtualization, CDN, cloud computing, and SaaS companies, that range from small startup to Fortune 500. During that time, three of his companies were acquired, he started two early cloud computing services, he owned strategic planning for two public companies with more than $1 billion in revenue, and he ran diligence for acquisitions ranging in value from $10 million to $6 billion.

Prior to joining Trinity Ventures as an EIR, Dave was VP of Technology and VP of Business & Corporate Development at Blue Coat Systems. During his time there, he was responsible for all strategic partnerships, including Microsoft, VMware, Dell, Oracle, and SAP, contributing to about $50 million in annual revenue.

Before Blue Coat, Dave was at UK-based virtual appliance company Zeus Technology, where he was VP of Marketing and Technology Strategy. During his time at Zeus, the company grew more than 60% annually, he created Zeus’ successful cloud strategy.

Prior to Zeus, Dave owned strategic planning for Citrix’s then-$700 million virtualization business unit, reporting directly to the CTO. He was responsible for the launch of the company’s first virtual desktop broker. He joined Citrix through the acquisition of NetScaler where he was Director of Product Management for acceleration and WAN optimization. Before that, he was Senior Director of Product Management at Trinity Venture’s portfolio company Speedera Networks (now Akamai), and he spent 5 years at Exodus Communications (now Savvis), where he was a founder of the 1500 person professional services organization. During that time, he also ran the web and Internet Engineering Certification Program for the University of California at Santa Cruz.

He studied Computer Science at UCSB, Computer Information Systems at Cal State and has an MBA from Wharton.

CA Ramps Up European Management Team

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CA, independent provider of IT management software, is strengthening its European management team to drive further growth throughout the region.

CA today announced that Patrick Starck, who was previously Corporate Senior Vice President (SVP) and Head of Sales for CA’s EMEA region, has been promoted to Corporate SVP and Chairman, CA Europe, while Kevin Tumulty, who was previously SVP and General Manager Area Sales for CA’s Northern and Southern Europe region, has been appointed SVP and Head of Sales for Europe.

As Corporate SVP and Chairman, CA Europe, Starck will be involved in the development and execution of CA’s growth plans and business development in the European market. He will continue to establish strategic relationships across major industry stakeholders; act as the local spokesperson for the Company’s industry analysts, media, and political institutions; and will engage with key government agencies and influencers by leveraging web social networking.Patrick has a wealth of IT leadership experience and has held regional positions at HP, Compaq and IBM throughout his career.

Tumulty will have management responsibility for the European and Israeli sales teams. He brings a wealth of talent and strong international experience to this leadership role, having previously established an exceptional team of CA sales and technical professionals across the region. Prior to joining CA, Kevin held EMEA, Regional, and Global roles in public and private equity- backed enterprise software companies.

CORAID Announces $10 Million Series A Funding, New Executives

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CORAID, a developer of scale-out storage with more than 1,100 customers worldwide, today announced that it has closed a $10 million Series-A financing round with Allegis Capital and Azure Capital Partners to accelerate the development and adoption of the CORAID EtherDrive storage platform.

With this funding, the company has named multiple Silicon Valley veterans to its executive team, including: Kevin Brown as CEO, Audrey MacLean as chairman of the board, Carl Wright as executive vice president of worldwide sales, and Josh Leslie as vice president of channels and business development. Lara Druyan of Allegis Capital and Paul Weinstein of Azure Capital Partners have joined CORAID’s board of directors; Mark Leslie and Charles Giancarlo have joined the advisory board and invested in the company.

CORAID is redefining the fundamental economics of storage with its Ethernet-based solutions that provide enterprises of all sizes with a flexible tier of high performance, scale-out storage. CORAID’s breakthrough EtherDrive storage platform has organically amassed over 1,100 customers, including large enterprise and government organizations, since its 2005 launch into the Linux market.

Using innovative software with 100-percent commodity hardware and raw Ethernet, EtherDrive storage arrays enable a scale-out SAN architecture that is ideally suited to dynamic virtualization and cloud environments. Starting at under $500 per terabyte and scaling to multiple petabytes, EtherDrive delivers a 5-8x price performance advantage over legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI solutions, while eliminating layers of complex SAN management.

This announcement coincides with the completion of the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) deployment of CORAID’s EtherDrive solution in its storage network to support high-performance computing for the National Human Genome Research project. Located in Rockville, Maryland, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is leading a nationwide effort to coordinate and accelerate human genome research. NHGRI has deployed more than 400 terabytes of CORAID EtherDrive storage in multiple environments, including high-performance computing, primary storage, and backup. The EtherDrive installation supports applications including DNA sequencing, bio-informatics, and data reduction.

Veeam Appoints VMware’s Daniel Fried To Managing Director for EMEA

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Veeam Software, provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today announced the promotion of Daniel Fried to managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Fried joined Veeam from VMware, where he was Director, Partner Sales, Southern EMEA.

“Daniel has spent the past 20 years creating and nurturing international high-tech companies, such as VMware, Alcatel and Philips,” explained George Sidoris, Veeam Software Vice President of Worldwide Sales. “His promotion follows on the heels of his excellent work and Veeam’s extraordinary growth in Europe. Despite the economic crisis, Veeam grew by 130 percent in Europe between 2008 and 2009.”Fried began his career with Veeam Software in 2008 when he launched the company’s French subsidiary in Paris and assumed leadership of the Southern EMEA region. In 2009 he expanded his responsibilities to build and supervise the Central Europe region for Veeam.

In little more than a year, Fried and his team have created a network of more than 1,000 partners in Europe, enabling Veeam to make a substantial impact on the small and medium business market and win a significant number of large enterprise accounts.