HP Poaches Former RackSpace Exec: Mark Interrante
HP is doubling down on its cloud efforts and there seems to be no better way to do that than to bring in experienced executive management. Mark Interrante was a Senior VP of Products and Engineering at RackSpace. He recently made it known that he was leaving his role of VP at RackSpace to pursue the same role at the computing giant HP. While RackSpace has been more cloud focused for the majority of the last of half the decade, HP is quickly catching up. By making hires such as this; it shows that HP is serious about its public and private cloud endeavours. It also gives the OpenStack platform more credibility as it tries to catch on as a mainstream cloud platform solution.
This hire makes sense because RackSpace is one of the pioneers of the OpenStack platform and it only makes sense to bring in an expert on the platform that can help develop and sell the cloud based system to the rest of the business world. On Mark Interrante’s LinkedIn page, he talks about his own credentials by saying, “Over 13 years of VP level product development experience with internet companies ranging from start-ups to global Fortune 500. Familiar with the challenges of Series A engineering as well as the transition to global scale. Has built from scratch or inherited and restructured teams from <50 to 900+ people. Managed portfolios and associated roadmaps, development and operations for a wide range of products including consumer, B2B, SaaS, IaaS, infrastructure, dedicated/hardware, and cloud.”
Even more impressive, Mr. Interrante also has a couple of computing patents under his belt dating all the way back to 2004. In a memo sent to HP employees earlier this week and obtained by Re/code, HP mentions that “Now is the time to bring in a leader to focus on the continued growth and excellence of the Cloud R&D function. Our ability to attract leaders of Mark’s caliber to the Cloud organization is further evidence of our momentum in the marketplace and of the strength of our plans.”
