As Deployments Kick Off, Edge Computing Startup Vapor IO Hires a COO

For many a startup founder and CEO there comes a time when they need a second-in-command. For Cole Crawford, founder of the edge computing infrastructure startup Vapor IO, that time came recently.

About a month ago Jacques Greyling, who until summer 2017 ran all things data center infrastructure at Rackspace, started in a new role as Vapor’s chief operating officer. The Austin-based startup has one of the fuller and bolder visions for edge computing, and now Crawford gets to focus on developing that vision further and selling others on the Vapor way, while Greyling devises an optimal strategy for implementing it.

“I see Cole as being the face of Vapor, someone [who] can now really focus on helping us attract the right customers,” Greyling, a 41-year-old South Africa native, told Data Center Knowledge in an interview. “For me it’s about making it real, making it practical, and making sure that the team understands that, and they buy into that.”

Rackspace’s Growing Pains

That last part, getting the team on board, is important. If you’ve ever tried to get someone to do something differently from how they’ve always done it, you know it’s not easy. Greyling has gone through this exercise at Rackspace, when he oversaw a wholesale rethinking of the way the company ran its international data center fleet.

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That process started in 2010, shortly after he was promoted to VP of the company’s global data centers and engineering. (He’d been with Rackspace for eight years at that point.) The company had grown quickly, adding data center capacity to keep up with demand without much thought about operational efficiency, he said.

When you’re serving customers out of multiple locations, with each site doing things its own way, and you keep adding locations, at some point it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to manage the infrastructure effectively. Rackspace needed to standardize operations, which became Greyling’s job.