Artisan Infrastructure yesterday said that it has appointed Mark Spowart as Vice President and General Manager of its newly formed OEM and ISV business unit. This business unit will leverage the success of Artisan Infrastructure’s wholesale only IaaS model by focusing on expanding existing and new relationships with leading equipment and top cloud ISVs.
Prior to joining Artisan Infrastructure, Spowart was CEO and co-founder of Zadara Storage, an Enterprise storage as a service company. Previously, he was president of StoreAge Networking Technologies focused on network storage virtualization. He led the company from its initial product launch through to its acquisition by LSI in 2006. At LSI he was VP of their $100M software business line with over 250 people in three countries. Spowart has also held roles as VP of Sales for QLogic, and prior to that, ATL Products where he led the company from start-up to $400M in sales, an IPO, and eventual acquisition by Quantum.
According to a press release issued late yesterday by Artisan, Spowart stated that while although the public cloud market, in general, is booming, “the channel has been disenfranchised by the public cloud provider and now OEMs and ISVs that have become service providers themselves. Most of this business is direct with end users, creating continual conflict with the channel and is not a model most VARs or service providers will tolerate.”
Artisan Infrastructure’s wholesale only model allows VARs to leverage their trusted advisor position within IT data centers to build a very profitable cloud services practice and participate in the public cloud growth rather than fighting against it.
