Some of you may have noticed that as of Monday I no longer work for EMC. It was a hard decision to leave there after five years, mainly due to the great people I have been privileged to work with and for. While I look fondly back at my time there, I’m excited to tell you about my future.

I’m excited to join Jesse Proudman (@blueboxjesse) and the rest of the team at Blue Box!

I’m joining Blue Box as a Technical Marketing Manager, helping to tell the Blue Box story. Why am I so excited about this company and this role?

The future of software is open source. Not just open source software freely available to end users, but also vendors using open source to speed their time to market by avoiding re-solving solved problems. This lets them focus on the unique value proposition they can bring. OpenStack is a great example of this. There are few organizations that can download OpenStack straight from github and use it to run their cloud- CERN and Comcast to name a few.

How do enterprises take advantage of the value OpenStack can bring without having to add a lot of domain-specific talent that’s already in high demand? To me, the answer is managed solutions like Blue Box Cloud. Customers can get all the value of an OpenStack-based private cloud without the upfront investment.

Now combine that with the rest of the IBM Cloud portfolio and the power and reach of an organization of IBM’s size, it’s not hard to see why I’m excited.