CIQ announced that nine cloud computing and Linux veterans have signed on to form the CIQ leadership team. Founded by CentOS co-founder and Rocky Linux founder Gregory Kurtzer, CIQ aims to be a one-stop resource for Rocky Linux users, providing enterprise support and services at all levels of businesses and organizations.
This follows CIQ's $26 million Series A round in May , led by Two Bear Capital; the goal is to build a suite of enterprise workflow orchestration and hybrid cloud solutions designed to support enterprises in tackling high-performance computing (HPC) ) to include non-traditional workloads such as high-end data analytics and AI/ML models, whether on-premises or in the cloud. In July, Google Cloud announced that it had generally made its optimized version of Rocky Linux generally available to users of its cloud infrastructure services.
Gregory Kurtzer said, " The next-generation software infrastructure we're building at CIQ will help businesses and organizations handle data-intensive workflows - from big data analytics to HPC for modeling and simulation, to training complex machine learning models .The CIQ team has legendary experience building and running Linux-based infrastructure at scale for some of the most demanding applications. From the base OS, through the cloud, virtual machines, containers, all the way to the top of the unified application stack, The CIQ team uniquely understands the perspectives of customers across industries. Together, we are developing a game plan to show businesses how to embrace the future of software infrastructure faster, with less risk and a shorter path to success. ”
According to the presentation, CIQ's senior leadership team now includes:
- Robert Adolph, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer - For the past 25 years, Adolph has introduced disruptive innovation in technology and business strategy. He has integrated engineering and R&D experience with large partners and customers in the fields of engineering, computing, digital and project management. Adolph has been an advisory board member and angel investor for many start-ups and is a quality partner for clients in the development of innovative projects.
- Rob Dufalo, Senior Vice President of Engineering - Dufalo works on both ends of the computing spectrum, providing solutions for the world's second largest search engine, and has been working on IoT and embedded computing solutions for over 20 years. He has extensive experience developing, quality management, and operating cloud-native solutions.
- John Frey, Chief Technology Officer - Frey has spent the last 20 years of his career building partnerships, mergers and acquisitions and operating cost efficiencies. His primary focus is to leverage his research and engineering experience to combine machine learning with data-driven insights to address HPC and cloud computing solutions for CIQ's current product stack.
- Gregory M. Kurtzer, Co-Founder and CEO - Kurtzer has over 20 years of experience in Linux, open source and HPC. He is well known in the HPC field for designing scalable and manageable security architectures for innovative performance-intensive computing while working for the US Department of Energy and the University of California, Berkeley. Kurtzer founded and led several large open source projects such as CentOS Linux, the Warewulf and PERCEUS cluster toolkits, the container system Singularity, and the recent CentOS successor, Rocky Linux.
- David LaDuke, VP of Marketing - LaDuke is a former head of marketing at Apple and NeXT who started his open source career as the founder and CMO of Linuxcare. He went on to found Sputnik, the world's first cloud solution for managing guest Wi-Fi networks. Sputnik merged with Lokket in 2017 to form what is now a growing Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) focused on delivering affordable broadband to schools and underserved communities across the United States
- Stephen Moody, Senior Vice President, Support and Technology - Moody is a technology executive who has worked at MIW for over 15 years, where he developed proprietary products focused on harnessing green technologies. His experience with IBM, Boeing, Microsoft, Rackable Systems and ZT Systems has given him the opportunity to leverage his capabilities to build high performance technical teams and solutions.
- Marlin Prager, Chief Financial Officer - Prager has over 26 years of experience in the media and entertainment industry and has been directly involved in equity, debt and M&A transactions totaling over $10 billion. He previously worked for Legendary Entertainment, which was acquired by Wanda in 2016. Before joining CIQ, he worked on several start-up projects including Open Drives and Illuscio. Prager was a partner at W2 Films and founded Digital Cinema Ventures, which supports the rollout of digital projectors in theaters. Prager started his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he qualified as a CPA.
- Brock Taylor, HPC VP and Strategic Partner - Taylor brings over 20 years of silicon experience at Intel Corporation and most recently AMD. He has held positions such as solution architect, manager, and director of HPC systems, where he has focused on abstracting the complexity of HPC systems from users to help expand access to these technologies in science and engineering.
- Art Tyde, VP of Business Development - Tyde is a 30-year open source veteran with extensive technical sales and engineering experience in startups and enterprises. Known as the founder of the enterprise Linux service and support industry, Tyde founded the San Francisco (and Silicon Valley) Bay Area Linux User Group in 1994 and co-founded Linuxcare with David LaDuke, VP of Marketing at CIQ.
Related Reading: Rocky Linux Receives CIQ Technical Support