The CEO of recently acquired Tier 3 has joined Seattle-based managed cloud provider Blue Box as CEO. Blue Box is a managed cloud infrastructure provider, focused on delivering managed private OpenStack cloud on dedicated hardware.
Matthew Schiltz, who served as CEO of Tier 3 until its acquisition by CenturyLink last November, will serve as Blue Box CEO, effective immediately. Schiltz is a proven CEO with a track record of partnering with technical founders and growing cloud companies to the next level of success.
Blue Box founder and current CEO Jesse Proudman will transition to the new role of chief technology officer and will remain on the board of directors. On Thursday of last week, Proudman was selected by GeekWire as the Young Entrepreneur of the Year during Seattle’s GeekWire Awards. Selection is based on community voting from peers in the Seattle entrepreneurial community.
“Matt understands what it takes to accelerate growth at a cloud service provider,” said Proudman. “His direct industry experience and successful track record is precisely what Blue Box needs for its next stage of growth. We’ve built an incredible technology and operations foundation and as we launch Blue Box Cloud to a market hungry for managed OpenStack offerings, Matt will be instrumental in helping us reach new customers, partners and markets.”
Schiltz remarked that “Blue Box’s IP portfolio is a key differentiator. They have already done the hard technical work required to reliably stand up a consistent cloud architecture for many customers in our data centers. That team experience, collective knowledge and IP mean that our deployment teams will be able to keep pace with rapid growth while helping our ops and customer service teams deliver the one-on-one attention and reliability that Blue Box is known for.”
General Availability of Blue Box Cloud
The executive team addition parallels the company’s launch of a new OpenStack managed hosting service. In beta since last fall, Blue Box Cloud will be in general availability starting May 12, the first day of OpenStack Summit in Atlanta.
Blue Box Cloud is a managed OpenStack private cloud offering on dedicated hardware available in multiple data centers. Because it runs on hardware dedicated to each customer, it addresses data sovereignty issues that make public clouds a poor choice for some applications in healthcare, government and for business-sensitive workloads. Blue Box Cloud’s use of dedicated hardware eliminates the “noisy neighbor” problems common in public clouds and the tendency among public cloud users to reserve more VMs than they need in order to support their SLAs.
Blue Box Cloud runs a consistent architecture of OpenStack, where hardware blueprint and software configuration are the same across all customer implementations. Additionally, Blue Box has developed a proprietary configuration, deployment and management suite that underpins the individual OpenStack environments. It provides cloud management and performance monitoring, hardware deployment, inventory management, metering and billing, CRM and support capabilities. This homogeneous architecture improves scalability, performance and availability for Blue Box Cloud customers.
“Our proprietary platform lets us reliably spin up and manage many clouds for many customers, all leveraging the same core OpenStack architectural opinion. This allows us to shorten time to market for customers to hours opposed to weeks or months for other providers,” said Proudman. “Imagine OpsWare for the cloud era. This is a powerful differentiator.”
“Users have made it clear that they want choices in how to consume OpenStack,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “Blue Box Cloud brings useful benefits to the managed services option, namely an OpenStack offering on dedicated hardware for customers who need the advantages that approach offers.”
Blue Box is exhibiting at the OpenStack Summit May 12-16 in Atlanta, booth E14.
