Hewlett-Packard veteran David Butler has joined Eucalyptus Systems, developers of an open source private cloud platform, as vice president of marketing. Butler essentially becomes the Eucalyptus Systems Channel Chief,l overseeing the Eucalyptus partner program at a time when the company apparently is experiencing rapid expansion and growth. But Eucalyptus is also facing stiff competition from all sides.
According to Eucalyptus’ statement, Butler has plenty of cloud experience: In his most recent position as VP of marketing for Digital Reef, Butler was in charge of establishing on-premise and cloud-hosted information governance solutions. And at HP Software, Butler was involved in marketing and strategy for their private cloud and data storage solutions.
For those unfamiliar, the idea behind Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition is to turn legacy hardware into an Amazon EC2-compatible private cloud platform. Eucalyptus works closely with such companies as Canonical, which built the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud on top of Eucalyptus’ platform.
Still, competition looms. The Rackspace-backed OpenStack project is building momentum. Despite Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos’ public confidence to the contrary, OpenStack may well start competing with Eucalyptus for the hearts and minds of cloud service providers. And yet Eucalyptus is reporting strong growth.
Butler will continue to work with existing Eucalyptus channel program head Brady Murray to build out their partner base as they try to build more momentum in 2011.
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Matthew,
Thanks for the write-up! Yes, as VP Marketing, David’s responsibility includes partnerships and channels, which as you note is headed by Brady Murray. But the VP Marketing role also includes product management, product marketing, demand generation, analyst relationships, and so on. Feel free to reach out to David for a full interview if that would be of interest to your readers.
Kind regards,
Marten Mickos
CEO, Eucalyptus Systems