Virtuozzo has announced a new CEO that may be a familiar name to those in the cloud computing industry. George Karidis, a 20+ year veteran of the software industry, has joined Virtuozzo as its new chief executive officer and will focus on leading aggressive company growth and expansion by
innovating with new technology, driving new use cases for both service
providers and enterprises, and leveraging new channels to market.
Kardis served as chief strategy officer and chief operating officer at cloud
infrastructure platform provider SoftLayer Technologies, which was
acquired by IBM in 2013 for $2 billion. He also held the position of president, Cloud Technology Services, at
CompuCom, an IT managed services and infrastructure solutions provider.
Late last year, Virtuozzo spun out of Parallels into a standalone company. Today, they offer a complete portfolio of open source and
commercial virtualization products, including production-ready
containers, an optimized KVM hypervisor, and software-defined storage.
An early innovator in open source container virtualization technology, Virtuozzo developed the first commercially available containers in 2001. Since then, the company has built out an expanded portfolio of solutions that enable the industry's only secure system containers, as well as virtual machines and software-defined storage. Today, Virtuozzo is leveraged by 700+ service providers, ISVs and enterprises worldwide to enable more than 5 million virtual environments running mission-critical, production workloads.
Virtuozzo is an active sponsor and participant in the open source community, and a major contributor to numerous open source initiatives and projects, including OpenVZ, CRIU, KVM, Docker, OpenStack and the Linux kernel. The company is also a member of Linux Foundation, Open Container Initiative, Cloud Native Foundation, and i2coalition.
"The container phenomenon has opened up a huge and disruptive opportunity in the virtualization market, and Virtuozzo is at the heart of it with its proven, production-ready containers, and new solutions for virtual machines and storage," said Karidis. "I'm thrilled to join the team and look forward to the journey ahead with our people, partners and customers."
"Mr. Karidis possesses a first-hand perspective on the evolving needs of service providers and has also spent a great deal of time working with enterprise end users to understand their cloud infrastructure requirements," said Philbert Shih, managing director, Structure Research. "This unique mix of service provider and enterprise experience combined with his ability to drive a vision and strategy for growth is a huge asset not only for Virtuozzo, but also for its partners and customers."