"We have a fantastic engineering team that continues to find creative and patentable solutions to IaaS technical challenges," said Cloudscaling's new CEO Michael Grant Wednesday as it was announced that he was stepping in to replace company co-founder Randy Bias - who in turn moves now into the CTO role at the company he co-founded with fellow Cloud pioneer Adam Waters.

Bias remains Chairman of the company.

"Cloudscaling has launched four large service provider clouds in the past nine months with an expanding pipeline of new customer opportunities," Grant continued. adding:

"It's an honor to join a proven team with a clear vision and significant market traction. Similarly, it's rare when a CEO arrives to find such an impressive portfolio of customer wins. ...The stage is set for the some exciting product developments later in the year."

Cloudscaling builds some of the world's largest clouds for service providers, governments, and enterprises.

"When Randy and I began building the company," said Adam Waters, co-founder and COO, "we planned for the time when Cloudscaling would be ready for a CEO with Michael's level of experience. His background and experience in product development, strategic marketing, and managing high growth startups will accelerate Cloudscaling's plans while letting Randy and I focus on what we do best: developing customer and partner relationships, expanding the team, and continuing to establish thought leadership."

The Cloudscaling team is comprised of cloud veterans and pioneers from industry leading companies such as Amazon, GoGrid, RightScale, Opscode, Canonical, Ejasent, Reductive Labs, Engine Yard, VMWare, and Microsoft. The company's leadership frequently speaks at the world's most prominent cloud computing conferences and forums, and Randy Bias is considered one of the Top 50 Bloggers on Cloud Computing.

"Changing the leadership in a small business is always hard and scary for the founders," wrote Bias himself, in his blog timed to coincide with the announcement, "but we know what it takes to win and this is how we play the game. You can be certain of a number of continued and exciting announcements from Cloudscaling in 2011, and I appreciate your participation in the blog and your support of the business."



Bias (pictured) also took the opportunity to review Cloudscaling's historic 2010, in which the company really put itself on the Cloud map:

"During Q1 of 2010 everything began to come together. We saw telcos and service providers as being a key segment we could enable in competing with Amazon. We also realized that most cloud vendors and customers trying to build clouds had no real understanding of what it took to compete with Amazon, while we did. Simultaneously, we landed a handful of visionary clients in our sweet spot.

Since then we launched four large clouds: 3 compute clouds and 1 storage cloud, the storage cloud being the first public service based on OpenStack Storage (Swift). We expanded the team by more than 10x and also increased revenues by more than 10x."

Priot to joining Cloudscaling, Grant served as CEO of Ejasent, a provider of software for server resource management and data center cost management, where he led the company's growth and subsequent acquisition by Veritas in 2004. He was also CEO and co-founder of Redmojo, a heterogeneous virtualization management company which later became the core of PlateSpin Orchestrate after Redmojo was acquired by Novell in 2007.

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