SIOS Expanding Cloud and Open Source Solutions Outside Japan

SIOS Technology Group will expand its business of assisting large enterprises in adopting cloud computing technology, leveraging its previous success in serving the data centers of Fortune 1000 enterprises based in Japan.

To drive the strategy, SIOS will significantly expand its operations based out of Silicon Valley, creating a SIOS Technology Corp. division focused on global cloud computing opportunities. This division will include SIOS’ SteelEye Technology Inc. subsidiary, a firm providing business continuity solutions to the enterprise data center, as part of a single operation.

The company will complete the transition of SteelEye into SIOS Technology Corp. by Oct. 1, 2010.

"With more than a decade in assisting large enterprises with data center convergence, SIOS is well positioned to assist enterprise CIOs in their adoption of cloud computing technologies," said Nobuo Kita, SIOS president and chief executive officer. "Our company was established and has been successful based on the rise of open standards and open source solutions  – the very foundations of cloud computing. We believe we are in the best position to understand and guide customers into the cloud."

Today’s news, coinciding with SIOS’ earnings announcement, builds on the company’s initial Feb. 22 launch of its differentiated strategy for leading Fortune 1000 companies into the cloud. SIOS is leveraging best-in-class technologies and partners to integrate application migration, monitoring, high availability and disaster recovery capabilities into a centrally administered private cloud platform as a service.

SIOS on March 2 at the CeBIT exhibition unveiled its first release of a differentiated cloud solution that provides application management and automation across multiple cloud environments with integrated application as well as data availability solutions. This is the first step in providing solutions that will enable ‘push button deployment’ of applications across heterogeneous cloud environments.

SIOS’ commitment to this strategy is reflected by its recent recruitment of several veteran executives to lead this new subsidiary.

They include:

• Jim Kaskade, general manager and chief of cloud: Kaskade is responsible for leading the team and setting SIOS’ global cloud strategy. He most recently founded and led a digital media SaaS company servicing more than 10,000 enterprises including recognized giants such as Lucasfilm, SonyBMG, the National Basketball Association, Viacom and News Corp. Kaskade is a business leader having spent more than a decade in the data center with the largest data warehousing installations in the world, working for such companies as NCR, AT&T and Teradata. He also spent a decade as a CEO for several Silicon Valley venture-backed startups.
• Surendra Reddy, chief technology officer: Reddy is most recently known for his position as vice president of Yahoo!’s cloud computing and virtualization business unit. Working in close coordination with senior executive teams and architects, Reddy developed Yahoo!’s organization-wide cloud computing strategy. Reddy is a technology leader in data center architecture, implementation and operational strategies who began his career in Silicon Valley working on data center server consolidation and grid computing solutions for such Fortune 500 enterprises as Oracle and later as a co-founder of Optena Corp. He also architected and delivered a cloud-based supply chain platform at Mitrix.
• Scott Armour, chief operating officer: Armour is responsible for day to day operations for the new entity and comes from a strong sales and operations background with enterprise software companies. He began his career at IBM, where he spent more than 16 years in various sales and operational functions, including running enterprise sales and operations within IBM’s $7 billion Americas Software business. Armour also led sales and field operations for BEA, Sun Microsystems and several enterprise software startups.
• John Barnett, vice president of professional services: Barnett has a long history of building professional services practices from concept. His most recent position was at Quest Software where he was vice president of Professional Services running the company’s U.S. practice, including a 65-person team of regional directors, practice managers, PS salespeople, architects, consultants, trainers and operations personnel, as well as 200 subcontractors. Products he supervised and managed included application management, database management with HA/DR and backup and recovery, windows solutions with AD DR, and virtualization management with Vizioncore products.

"We are no longer a silent force outside of Japan," Kaskade said. "With the strength of a publicly backed company, coupled with the spirit of a startup, and armed with some of the strongest leaders in the industry, you can expect some great things from SIOS."

SIOS Technology Corp. is now working with some of the largest enterprises in the United States and EMEA, assisting CIOs in automating their businesses using open source and cloud computing technologies in the areas of virtualization, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and software as a service.