Platform9 Appoints Jim Ensell as Chief Marketing Officer

SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 4, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Platform9, the next-generation open cloud company, today announced the appointment of Jim Ensell as chief marketing officer. Ensell brings 20+ years of experience leading marketing strategies in the cloud, SaaS, enterprise and open source industries for startups, mid-size companies and $1B+ market leaders. He will scale Platform9's marketing and sales operations to meet the growing enterprise demand for managing hybrid clouds across any infrastructure.

"Platform9's next generation open-source-as-a-service technology presents a once in a generation opportunity to win the fast growing enterprise cloud market," said Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO at Platform9. "Jim is a proven marketing executive who has an impressive breadth and depth of experience in architecting hard-hitting marketing campaigns. I am thrilled to welcome Jim to our leadership team as we scale Platform9."

According to a blog post on Forrester's 2018 predictions¹, the cloud is consolidating and enterprise IT leaders must start planning now to mitigate lock-in risk. Organizations can address this challenge by implementing open source platforms that work across cloud infrastructure and are easy to deploy, manage and maintain. Platform9 enables enterprises to realize their hybrid and multi-cloud strategies by delivering, as a service, the leading open source cloud frameworks including OpenStack, Kubernetes and Fission. Together this makes up Platform9's Open Cloud solution, providing enterprises with benefits including rapid application development and deployment and time to redirect focus from infrastructure management to more value added activities. This results in dramatically improved time to value and reduced IT costs.

As a seasoned chief marketing officer, Ensell will lead all global marketing functions at the company. Before joining Platform9, Ensell was CMO at HyperGrid, where he led global marketing and the company's repositioning from being a hyperconverged infrastructure provider to an innovative multi-cloud management player. Before that he was CMO at Electric Cloud where he drove their transformation from a development tools company to a recognized DevOps category leader. He has an exceptional track record driving marketing strategies in the IT and related industries, including other executive marketing roles at Coho Data, CollabNet, Cadence Design Systems, and Virage Logic.

"Platform9 has a strong foundation in place and I am eager to build on that and help propel the business forward as the company continues to focus on strategies that fuel growth and drive innovation in this burgeoning enterprise cloud market," said Ensell. "This is a great time to come on board as Platform9's SaaS-managed open source industry standard solutions are gaining rapid adoption in large enterprises, and I'm excited to join such an impressive and dedicated team.

This appointment comes on the heels of a successful year for Platform9. The company secured $22 million in series C funding, launched the Platform9 Cloud Partner Program and was recognized by CRN as a Tech Innovator Award winner for container services. Platform9's customer roster now includes 60+ enterprises such as Cadence Design Systems, Autodesk and Providence Health & Services.

About Platform9
Platform9 delivers the next-generation open cloud for enterprises to deploy, monitor and maintain hybrid clouds across multiple platforms. Platform9 provides cloud infrastructure like OpenStack and Kubernetes as SaaS-managed solutions, along with the serverless project, Fission, to customers such as Cadence, Autodesk, Splunk and EBSCO, enabling speed and scale without being locked into a single vendor ecosystem. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and is backed by Redpoint Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Canvas Ventures and HPE. For more information, visit https://platform9.com/.

Media Contact
Candice DeForest
Bateman Group for Platform9
[email protected]

¹ Predictions 2018: Cloud Computing Accelerates Enterprise Transformation Everywhere, November 2017 Forrester blog post by Dave Bartoletti

SOURCE Platform9

Related Links

https://platform9.com