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Industry Moves: DataCore Promotes Christian Hagen to VP Sales for the Americas & EMEA

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DataCore Software has appointed Christian Hagen as its new Vice President of Sales for the Americas & EMEA. Hagen, the former Vice President of Sales and Partner Development EMEA, is now also responsible for all DataCore sales and channel activities in the Americas. With this appointment, DataCore aims to leverage its European distributor and channel partner programs in the US as well as in Europe. The partner enablement model has proven itself in Europe, where it has successfully empowered distribution and reseller partners.

During his tenure as Vice President of EMEA Sales and Partner Development for DataCore, Christian Hagen led DataCore’s EMEA business to record growth rates by nearly doubling annual sales and doubling the number of business partners on a yearly basis. The 46-year-old German successfully broadened the company’s market footprint with a two-tier distribution model – targeting distribution partners and value-added resellers (VARs) with strong technical expertise in virtualization markets. The company has also aligned its sales and support organization in order to better enable channel partners to multiply their business with virtual platforms like Citrix XenServer, VMware, Microsoft VS, Oracle VM, Sun VM, Virtual Iron, etc., in conjunction with DataCore storage virtualization.

Christian Hagen joined DataCore Software in 2000 and directed the company’s activities in Central Europe from 2004 on. In 2007 he was appointed Vice President of EMEA Sales and Partner Development and extended the successful central European approach into the European markets, as well as the Middle East and Africa. Christian Hagen has 20 years experience in the storage industry and is recognized as expert in virtualization, storage management, business continuity and disaster recovery. He held various positions in sales, engineering, support, and business development at Deutsche Bank, Sterling Software, Computer Associates and IBM.

Industry Moves: Kathryn Rose Joins Hyperic As CFO, Ron Oglesby Leaves Glasshouse for Dell

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Open source web infrastructure management provider Hyperic (earlier coverage) today announced it has named Kathryn Rose as chief financial officer (CFO). In this newly created position, Rose will be responsible for the company’s financial operations plan as well as being part of the executive team that sets strategic direction.

Rose brings nearly 20 years expertise in financial management and capital markets at both large public companies and smaller, privately held startups—much of that in the tech sector—to Hyperic. Her CFO-level roles include successful tenures at global consumer products company Leapfrog as well as at Autodesk, Sage Systems and Foresight Energy Company. She has also held high-level financial positions at Merrill Lynch and Chevron. Rose’s work ranges from raising $200 million in venture capital, to tight integration of financial and strategic functions across global enterprises to increase profitability.

Rose holds an MBA in finance from the University of California at Berkeley, and a BA from the University of Texas, Austin.

Glasshouse Technologies has lost its Director of Virtualization and Architecture Services, Ron Oglesby, after just one year. Oglesby co-authored two best seller books about VMware Infrastructure: VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide and VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide. Rumor has it Oglesby was hired by Dell.

Industry Moves: Christopher Page (Vizioncore) and Patrick Clark (Expert Server Group)

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Vizioncore today announced Christopher Page as the company’s new Director of Product Management, reporting to company VP of Products and Support, Jason Mattox.

Prior to joining Vizioncore, Page spent 18 years in product management and engineering positions at companies such as Motorola, Macrovision and Navteq. His diverse experience includes managing the development of software, data content and hardware products. Page’s accomplishments include helping companies win new business, developing new products and marketing complex technologies.

Page also holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management as well as an MS in Electrical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Expert Server Group also announced the appointment of Patrick L. Clark as Chief Operating Officer. As COO, Clark will be responsible for developing and overseeing Expert Server Group’s growing sales force and customer relations programs.

Clark’s extensive background spans the history of Internet and networking technology, starting early on as a co-founder and VP of Sales and Marketing at Interlan, one of the first local area network product companies, and continuing through his most recent role as head of Worldwide Sales for Converged Access, a leader in VoIP Application Performance Management.

Clark also brings the experience of building worldwide sales organizations. Prior to Converged Access, he was head of North American sales and service at Phone.com, a leading provider of wireless Internet infrastructure software to global telecommunications companies. Before that, he was the vice president of worldwide sales with Paragon Software, a leading provider of data and content synchronization software for the major wireless handset vendors and global telecommunications companies that was acquired by Phone.com in early 2000. Prior to Paragon Software, Clark was vice president of worldwide sales at Software.com, a leading provider of Internet/Intranet infrastructure software to global Telcos and Internet Service Providers (ISP’s). Previous to Software.com, Clark was EVP worldwide sales and field marketing for Computervision, a leading provider of CAD/CAM software and services where he was part of the successful turnaround of this $800 million software company.

Clark held significant roles in startup and high growth companies throughout his career. First, as the co-founder of Interlan, an early pioneer in the local area networking product space, and then serving as EVP and general manager with Microcom, a leading manufacturer of protocol modem, internetworking bridges/routers and communications software.

Clark also was a general partner of Windspeed Ventures, a seed round and early stage investment group in software and communications infrastructure companies. Clark sat on the advisory board for privately held companies Bitfone, Esmertec and Vividon.

KVM Lives On At Red Hat, So Now What?

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Over a year after the first big Open Source Virtualization acquisition, Citrix Acquiring Xensource, the next industry shaking acquisition is a fact. Red Hat has reeled in Virtualization startup Qumranet, While RedHat had already announced that they were going to support both KVM and Xen in their product range , taking over Qumranet for some people sounds like a really strange thing to do , afterall apart from its work on KVM as the underlying opensource component of their product, Qumranet is a pretty proprietary software company.

Qumranet understood that the Bare Metal Low Layer virtualization layer was not going to bring them any money any day soon. There were going to be different Free and free alternative Virtualization layers out there anyhow so why keeping theirs secret rather than having it flourish as a community product and contribute back to the linux kernel community while at it.

On the other hand the products of Qumranet were closed, altough based on Linux their business was in selling a VDI solution to bigger customers. The question now becomes how this kind of product range will fit into RedHat’s tradidional Open Source offering. Red Hat has a long history of opensourcing everything they do. Obviously there is Redhat Linux, Jboss but also
the proprietary directory server they bought from Netscape which they opensourced . Sometimes it takes a while, like with their Satellite product, but they have a good track record here. So most parts of the SolidIce product line will be opensourced , but will they grow a community ?

Lots of people ask themselves if RedHat was interrested in the VDI infrastructure or did the just want to have the KVM Kernel developers on board. The fact is that they have a direct entry into managing Windows desktops , a market previously closed for themAnd that makes it an interresting move. As of now, managing a windows box is just managing a file on a Linux server, easy to copy, easy to replace.

With RedHat clearly preferring KVM over Xen in the future. What’s going to happen with Xen in the other distributions.
The 451 group reports that
“Novell insists Xen is its hypervisor of choice and it remains committed to the virtualization software and project.”,
but as we all know .. Novell will be working on other interoperability challenges too.

With Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux being a RedHat derivate the future of Virtualization in Unbreakable becomes an interresting topic.
Oracle clearly choose the Xen platform as their favourite virtualization technology earlier. And given the fact that it will be hosting the next
North American Xen summit , Oracle seems to plan on continuing to build their platform on Xen.

To close of there’s also the question of people at Qumranet, Qumranet was cofounded by serial virtualization enterpreneur Moshe Bar who previously had also cofouned Qlusters and Xensource What’s he going to do , will he stay around at RedHat or will he refocus to his other startup Sullego.

In a couple of weeks Xensource will celebrate it’s first anniversary at Citrix , let’s see what happens then …

PHD Technologes “Acq-hires” Xtravirt Co-founder Alex Mittell

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PHD Technologies (previous coverage), provider of the esXPRESS data protection solution for virtualized infrastructures, today announced the acquisition of UK-based Xtravirt’s suite of virtualization products. As part of the transaction, Xtravirt co-founder, Alex Mittell, will join PHD Technologies as Director of Research & Development. Xtravirt will continue to partner with PHD Technologies as a distributor of esXPRESS to existing and new Xtravirt customers in the UK.

The virtualization tools acquired by PHD Technologies’ will benefit managers of virtualization infrastructures. These include VI3 SnapHunter, a virtual machine snapshot reporter; VI3 PatchDownloader, an automated downloader of VMware ESX patches; VISBU, an infrastructure backup utility and KS Quick Config, a tool to speed up the deployment and configuration of VMware ESX 3 servers.

Alex Mittell is widely known as a technical expert and thought leader in the virtualization community. Prior to co-founding Xtravirt, he worked at Oxford University in the UK as a virtual architect, setting up the university’s virtual infrastructure. Mittell will continue to be based in London.

vMAN Over At DMTF Is Immune To Kryptonite And Now Powered by OVF Version 1.0

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Like superheroes with a weak spot (remember Superman and green Kryptonite), large providers of green data center technologies and virtualization software had an Achilles’ heel with their vendor lock-in, which scared away quite a few prospects. Today the major players have all agreed to drop their distinct proprietary formats and aim to adopt the Open Virtualization Format 1.0 as soon as possible (most are already compliant upon release). We first learned about OVF during our interview with Ian Pratt and the release of this open standard is a great step forward. The short lead time of ‘only’ one year proves the industry has understood that open standards are the way to go.

Above is our exclusive video interview recorded at VMworld in Las Vegas, where DMTF president Winston Bumpus revealed the release of OVF 1.0 and their larger Virtualization Management Initiative (vMAN). vMAN provides IT managers the freedom to deploy pre-installed, pre-configured solutions across heterogeneous computing networks and to manage those applications through their entire lifecycle. This Initiative delivers much-needed open industry standards to the management of virtualized environments. Ultimately, the group’s goal is to eliminate the need for IT managers to separately install, configure and manage interdependencies between virtualized operating systems and applications, by enabling automated management of the virtual machine lifecycle.

This new specification created by Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XenSource is about to become an industry standard and aspires to help ensure portability, integrity and automated installation/configuration of virtual machines. We did not have the time to transcribe the interview yet, but already took a few of Winston Bumpus’ quotes from the DMTF press release.

“With the increasing demand for virtualization in enterprise management, the new spec developed through this industry-wide collaboration dove-tails nicely into existing virtualization management standardization activity within the DMTF…
OVF extends the work we have underway to offer IT managers automation of critical, error-prone activities in the deployment of a virtualized infrastructure.”

By collaborating on the development of the OVF specification, the DMTF group aims to make it easier for IT organizations to pre-package and certify software packaged as virtual machine templates for deployment in their virtualized infrastructure and to facilitate the secure distribution of pre-packaged virtual appliances by ISVs and virtual appliance vendors.