Joyent Is About To Replace Its CEO (Again) With An Executive Poached From Cisco
The company has hired a new CEO, Scott Hammond, who was formerly running Cisco's cloud computing software business.
Hammond will replace Henry Wasik as the outgoing CEO. The formal announcement will go out on Thursday, we're told.
Hammond landed at Cisco when it bought a company called Newscale in 2011 for an undisclosed sum. He was CEO. That was his third successful exit including two Internet startups from 1990's sold before the bubble burst.
So it's not surprising that after three years at Cisco he's ready to become CEO at a smaller company again. He tells us of working for startups: "It's an addiction, the ultimate challenge. I love slaying the dragon."
Still this is another round of change at the 10-year-old company. Wasik had been with Joyent for about 18 months, since November 2012. He replaced David Young, co-founder/CEO. And about a year ago, the face of Joyent, Jason Hoffman who was co-founder/CTO, stepped down and was replaced by Bryan Cantrill. Hoffman was a cancer pathologist doctor that founded the company because he wanted to build a computer platform powerful enough to find cures for disease.
Since then Joyent has become well-known as the keeper Node.js, a popular language for building cloud apps.
Plus it has vocally taken on VMware in the data center, claiming to cost pennies on the dollar. And it recently challenged the other big player, OpenStack. OpenStack is software built by a consortium of cloud players and is used by HP, Cisco, Rackspace, many others. Joyent just launched a competitor to OpenStack called SmartDataCenter 7 that it says is also cheaper and easier for enterprises to use.
It's also known as a Peter Thiel company. He was as an early investor - long before he became a Facebook billionaire. In 2012 Joyent raised $85 million from investors like Intel Capital and Telefonica and has raised about $110 million to date.
Hammond has his work cut out. Everybody is in a land grab for cloud computing these days.