Press release

Fairwinds Formed to Help Companies Scale Their Software on Cloud-Native Infrastructure

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Sponsored by Businesswire

Fairwinds, a managed cloud-native infrastructure provider, announced today that it has secured funding and appointed a CEO and key management team members to execute on its new business strategy. Formerly known as ReactiveOps, a leader in Kubernetes managed services, Fairwinds builds upon unmatched expertise to offer a portfolio of new SaaS products and services that will help customers quickly and effortlessly transition to a highly reliable, scalable, and secure cloud-native environment.

“The benefits of transitioning to cloud-native infrastructure are tremendously compelling, but at present the complexity of doing so is daunting to most engineering teams,” said Fairwinds CEO Bill Ledingham, who joined from Black Duck Software where he was CTO. “ReactiveOps has developed best practices, and a strong following, based on hundreds of successful production deployments. Fairwinds is focused on continuing to support those deployments while adding new products and services and growing our customer base.”

Container technology provides software teams a consistent, scalable, and portable way to package applications for multiple computing platforms. These benefits enable software teams to ship their products faster and become more agile in their delivery process. A recent Smarter With Gartner post states, “Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 30% today.”*

The Gartner post goes on to state, “Although there is growing interest and rapid adoption of containers, running them in production requires a steep learning curve due to technology immaturity and lack of operational know-how. I&O teams will need to ensure the security and isolation of containers in production environments while simultaneously mitigating operational concerns around availability, performance and integrity of container environments… Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard for container scheduling and orchestration, with a vibrant community and support from most of the leading commercial vendors.”

Fairwinds helps companies avoid this problem by building, managing, and monitoring production-grade Kubernetes infrastructure for their applications, enabling internal engineering teams to focus their time and resources on building their applications and services.

In conjunction with the funding, Bob Brennan (former CEO at Veracode and Iron Mountain) has been named Chairman of the Board, and Rob Ketterson (former Head of Private Equity at Fidelity Investments and founder of Volition Capital) will also join the Board. “We believe that the transition to cloud-native infrastructure provides a competitive edge for software companies and, as a result, presents Fairwinds with a large and rapidly growing market opportunity. I’m excited to be working with Bill, Rob, and the rest of the team to leverage our expertise and technology to lead this market segment,” said Bob Brennan.

In addition to Ledingham, Fairwinds has rounded out its executive team with the addition of Jun Ho Son, CFO, Joe Pelletier, VP of Strategy, and Brian Levin, VP of Sales. Kendall Miller, President, Sarah Zelechoski, VP of Engineering, and EJ Etherington, CTO, remain in their current roles.

*Smarter With Gartner, “6 Best Practices for Creating a Container Platform Strategy,” 23 April 2019.

About Fairwinds

Fairwinds Ops, Inc. provides expertly-managed cloud native infrastructure leveraging containers and Kubernetes. We build and maintain reliable, scalable, and secure Kubernetes clusters using a combination of open source technology, automation, best practices and expertise. The company is headquartered in Boston, MA and provides a fully remote and distributed work environment. Visit www.fairwinds.com for more information.