Platform9 Expands Its Executive Ranks With Two Strategic Hires

SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 6, 2015) - Platform9, the company making private clouds easy, today announced that Melinda Wilken has joined as vice president of marketing and that Adam Ulfers has joined as vice president of sales. These newly created positions round out the executive team as the company scales to meet the accelerating demand for its award-winning OpenStack private cloud management software.

"We've seen significant revenue momentum in our first two quarters of sales this year with quarter-over-quarter growth of 200%, multiple site-wide license agreements for more than 400 servers in each quarter and customer deployments in 17 countries," said Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform9. "I feel extremely fortunate to have Melinda and Adam join our executive team. Each brings a track record of excellence and is a great culture fit. Together, they will scale Platform9 with a world-class marketing and sales organization that complements our proven product team and game-changing technology."

Melinda Wilken brings more than 20 years of enterprise software marketing expertise to Platform9. Before Platform9, she was the founding VP of marketing at CloudPhysics, a SaaS-based analytics company serving VMware admins, and Couchbase, well-known among infrastructure and DevOps professionals for its leading open source NoSQL database technology. Previously, she was senior director of product marketing at VMware, where she launched the company's line of virtualization management and cloud automation solutions. She joined VMware in 2006 when the company acquired Akimbi Systems, where she was the founding vice president of marketing. Prior to Akimbi, she held marketing leadership roles with high technology companies including Informix Software (acquired by IBM), Brio Technology (acquired by Hyperion), Actional Corporation (acquired by Progress), and Rightworks (acquired by i2). 

"The cloud computing market continues to evolve, with swelling interest in the promise of the private cloud: achieving AWS-like infrastructure agility without forfeiting IT control. However, current solutions have proven complex and inflexible, littering the enterprise IT landscape with stalled private cloud projects and abandoned POCs," said Melinda Wilken, vice president of marketing at Platform9. "I'm thrilled to join Platform9, who is uniquely positioned to deliver on the promise of the private cloud. Our SaaS-based managed service gives customers simplicity and choice, delivering significant cost and control advantages to enterprise IT and removing longstanding barriers to widespread private cloud adoption."

Adam Ulfers brings 12 years of technology sales leadership to Platform9, along with a track record of managing high-velocity inside-sales teams and scaling sales productivity by empowering channel partners. He was previously at Cisco Meraki where he helped to build the US and then EMEA cloud technology sales teams. Under his leadership, Meraki's European operation grew from early-stage to $100 million in revenue in three years. Prior to Meraki, Adam was at Ricoh where he led top-performing commercial and strategic sales teams, driving results in a rapidly shifting market environment.

"This is an exciting time to be in the cloud computing market, where customers are investing billions of dollars annually on solutions that increase IT efficiency and accelerate time to market," said Adam Ulfers, vice president of sales at Platform9. "It's also an exciting time to join Platform9, whose technology unlocks the value of the private cloud for enterprise IT. Our early traction demonstrates the demand for 'hands-free' private cloud management, and I look forward to building a world-class team to scale our business and meet the needs of this expanding market."

About Platform9 
Platform9's mission is to make private clouds easy for organizations of any scale. The company's service transforms an organization's existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service on-premise cloud within minutes, enabling organizations small or large to run their private clouds efficiently, at scale, while leveraging the latest open source innovations. Powered by OpenStack, the service is the industry's first 100% cloud managed platform for KVM, VMware vSphere and Docker. Founded in 2013 by a team of early VMware engineers, Platform9 is backed by Menlo Ventures and Redpoint Ventures and headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. For more information, visit: http://www.platform9.com, or follow Platform9 on Twitter @platform9sys.