I find it helpful to review recent events so I can put them in perspective, so this blog is a quick summary of Skytap milestones over the last quarter. In my first Skytap blog I said I planned to be a regular contributor to the Skytap community, and in this piece I’d like to point out some highlights that have occurred at Skytap over the last three months.
In July I joined Skytap as CEO, and for the last quarter I’ve been working closely with the Skytap team to harness our resources to drive continued growth. Skytap offers a focused, purpose-driven cloud for specific use cases, and is a special company that offers a unique and compelling value proposition for developers and testers of code, and for IT organizations deploying production applications.
Skytap offers a differentiated solution for cloud-based, agile development, and I see my role as managing Skytap’s expansion stage. We already have over 260 customers and I hope many of them are reading this blog. Our corporate challenge now is to hit the accelerator on growth by focusing our resources to uniquely address customer needs with our Skytap Cloud solution.
Early this quarter we announced new enterprise-ready hybrid cloud capabilities that allow IT operations and Dev/Test professionals to quickly and securely extend on-premise environments to Skytap Cloud. This is driving business agility for functional users such as Dev/Test professionals while also empowering IT operations personnel with the security, visibility, and control capabilities that match or exceed on-premise IT requirements.
We showcased our cloud innovations for developers and testers at Agile 2013 in Nashville, VMworld in San Francisco, Camp IT in Rosemont, IL, and STARWEST in Anaheim. Having our resident cloud computing experts participate in industry discussions before development and test professionals is increasingly important to us as we articulate the unique value of Skytap Solutions. We also announced a new pre-configured Skytap Cloud template for Cloud Foundry v2 that allows enterprise development and test teams to deploy Cloud Foundry v2 environments within Skytap Cloud in fewer than 30 seconds. For an interesting perspective on this announcement, check out this IT Business Edge article.
I also appointed former HP executive Brian Barry as our new Vice President of Sales. Skytap has a strong history of attracting experienced talent from well-known leaders in the enterprise software industry. With cloud adoption in the enterprise expected to exponentially increase in the next several years, Brian’s experience with Fortune 500 customers make him the ideal candidate to drive our next phase of growth.
On a personal level, I’ve had an invigorating quarter working with some of the brightest minds in the industry and getting to know the outstanding people behind Skytap. I’ve also done some work with the media to talk about my perspectives on Skytap, as you can see in this Nextcast video interview. But keeping up with all that’s going on in the company and in the market has been particularly challenging in my first quarter, so I get into the office early every day, read everything, and ask a lot of questions.
Managing growth at Skytap is an exciting opportunity with a fascinating set of challenges, most of them focused on where to place our bets to best serve our customers with our purpose-driven cloud solutions. In the upcoming quarter, I’ll be meeting more with customers, prospects, analysts, and other members of the industry, so I hope you’ll read my future posts and subscribe to the Skytap Blog.
