Virtuozzo Appoints Cloud Executive George Karidis as Chief Executive Officer
November 9, 2016
Virtuozzo, a leading virtualization software provider, today announced the appointment of George Karidis as its chief executive officer. Mr. Karidis is a 20+ year veteran of the software industry. He has been a driving force in helping service providers and enterprises harness new cloud infrastructure models to fuel business growth and innovation. At Virtuozzo, Mr. Karidis 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. Today, Virtuozzo offers a complete portfolio of open source and commercial virtualization products, including production-ready containers, an optimized KVM hypervisor, and software-defined storage.
Over the course of his career, Mr. Karidis has established a proven track record of success in leading high-growth businesses. Mr. Karidis 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. Mr. Karidis played an integral role in building SoftLayer into the largest privately held cloud infrastructure services provider at the time with revenues approaching $400 million. Most recently, Mr. Karidis held the position of president, Cloud Technology Services, at CompuCom, an IT managed services and infrastructure solutions provider. He also held roles at Devonshire Investors, a private equity firm, as well as industry analyst firm The Yankee Group.
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.”
For more information, visit: https://virtuozzo.com/