rPath today announced that Tim Buckley, principal of Buckley Investments and former chief operating officer of Red Hat, has joined the rPath board of directors as the executive chairman. From his newly created post, Buckley will help rPath accelerate its push into the enterprise market with solutions for reducing the cost and complexity of delivering applications to traditional, virtualized, and cloud-based environments. 

“Tim is an operating executive with decades of experience in running sales organizations and go-to-market teams for software companies,” said Erik Troan, founder and CTO of rPath. “As an executive with Red Hat, I had the opportunity to work closely with Tim. Few others match his talent and leadership in growing companies in enterprise markets. This makes Tim a powerful addition to the rPath team and a key ingredient for our ongoing growth in the enterprise.” 

Buckley brings more than 20 years of experience in sales and marketing leadership for high-growth technology start-ups. Prior to founding Buckley Investments LLC, a Raleigh, NC-based consulting company, he was COO for Red Hat, where he was part of the executive team that transformed the company from a start-up to the dominant provider of open source operating systems to the enterprise market. Red Hat has publicly credited Buckley with its worldwide growth and transformation into an enterprise sales organization. 

Prior to Red Hat, Buckley was senior vice president of worldwide sales for Seattle-based Visio Corp., where he was instrumental in growing the company from start-up to IPO and ultimately through a $1.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft. Earlier, Buckley was an executive with Aldus, the developers of PageMaker; and Approach, which he helped launch from its early stages through a major acquisition by Lotus Development Corp. 

According to Buckley, “rPath has the perfect combination of team, technology, and market timing to be a major force in changing the way organizations think about enterprise application deployment and management. The importance of reducing the cost and complexity of application delivery is high on the minds of every CIO, who see this as an important step to increasing business responsiveness, reducing operating costs, and finding ways to do more with less. I am very enthusiastic about the rPath vision, and I’m looking forward to playing an active role in the company’s ongoing growth and success.” 

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