Cloud-savvy Ignition Gets Stronger with Franke Artale

Ignition Partners has a reputation for investing in promising cloud computing startups, and that tradition should carry on with the addition of Frank Artale as managing director. Notable recent successes for Ignition include Heroku, which Salesforce.com acquired for $212 million in November, and Splunk, an IT intelligence company that’s planning an IPO next year. Other notable cloud investments include Skytap and StorSimple. It’s an impressive track record that’s matched by Artale’s own.

He has been involved in the infrastructure space as an executive at Ignition-backed companies Consera, XenSource and Rendition Networks — sold to HP, Citrix and Opsware, respectively — and as part of Accel Partners. At Accel, Artale served as an adviser to Hadoop juggernaut Cloudera and NoSQL leader Membase. Most recently, Artale was vice president of business development at Citrix, a company with strong products for virtualization (XenServer) and cloud computing, as well as other network-based applications and management software.

With big data and cloud startups only continuing to proliferate as those technology sectors become increasingly important, Artale and his new team at Ignition will have plenty of opportunities to repeat past successes.