Cloud Veteran George Karidis Joins Virtuozzo as CEO

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Virtuozzo has named a new CEO that is a familiar face in the web hosting industry. George Karidis, formerly of SoftLayer and IBM, joined Virtuozzo on Tuesday to lead the company and drive its partner focus.

Virtuozzo currently offers a complete portfolio of open source and commercial virtualization products, including containers, an optimized KVM hypervisor, and software-defined storage.

Prior to Virtuozzo, Karidis was president, Cloud Technology Services, at managed services provider CompuCom. Karidis ran the cloud business unit for 18 months after leaving IBM, which he joined as part of its acquisition of SoftLayer in 2013. At SoftLayer, Karidis served as chief strategy officer and chief operating officer.

When it came to joining Virutozzo, Karidis said it was an easy choice; “I knew a lot of the team already, and they were a big partner when I was at SoftLayer,” Karidis said in an interview with The WHIR. Karidis replaces interim CEO Mike Riolo, SVP Worldwide Sales, Virtuozzo, who stepped in after Rob Lovell left the company in July.

READ MORE: After Parallels Spin Out, Virtuozzo Refocuses on Partners and Technology

Virtuozzo spun out of Parallels late last year as a standalone company. It’s hoping a renewed energy and market familiarity with containers will expose it to new partners and bring its virtualization platform into more hands.

“There’s a tremendous opportunity to go after managed service providers, and system integrators,” Karidis said. “OEMs are a great partner for us as well, and fit into this space perfectly.”

As it stands, Virtuozzo is used by more than 700 service providers, ISVs, and enterprises worldwide.

“We are going to stay true to who we are [by] investing in partners,” he says.

In addition to targeting new types of partners to boost its own partner channel, Karidis also sees an opportunity for Virtuozzo in partnering in the broader container ecosystem by forging partnerships with Docker and other significant players.

“I see us expanding our go-to-market approach,” he says.

With new leadership, Virtuozzo plans to launch new capabilities and services in the near future. For now, however, Karidis is remaining tight-lipped, but says they will present a “phenomonal opportunity for partners.”

This article was originally published here by The Whir.