Aptira,  a leading managed services company for OpenStack clouds, has appointed Simon Anderson as Executive Chairman to steer the company’s strategic direction as it continues to expand operations from the Asia-Pacific to Europe and the Americas.

He is an experienced US-based cloud technology executive with a track record in bringing new cloud software and services to the global IT market. He co-founded Inktank, the company behind the open source Ceph distributed storage system that has become the standard for block storage in OpenStack clouds.

Inktank was acquired by Red Hat in April 2014 for $175M. Simon was most recently Chairman and CEO of DreamHost, a US-based cloud hosting company that has built one of the leading OpenStack public clouds with over 400,000 customers worldwide. As a board member of the OpenStack Foundation from 2012 to 2015, Simon played a key role in expanding participation in the OpenStack project from companies worldwide.

“Aptira has the differentiated OpenStack expertise and broad managed services capability to successfully deliver OpenStack for enterprises worldwide”, said Anderson, executive chairman of Aptira. “I’m excited to lead the board of Aptira and build a global OpenStack managed services capability with the executive team.”

Aptira has built a global reputation as the leading OpenStack managed services company in the Asia-Pacific region, delivering expert design, implementation and management services for enterprise-grade OpenStack cloud infrastructure. The Aptira team have deep relationships and influence in the OpenStack community worldwide, developed through over five years of contributions, developer training, community events, and governance.  Currently two Aptira executives serve on the OpenStack Foundation board, and Aptira employs three of the 12 OpenStack Ambassadors worldwide.

With OpenStack cloud deployments accelerating globally, Aptira intends to capitalize on the skills gap and deliver best-in-class OpenStack managed services to enterprises worldwide, from a strong expert foundation built on serving large customers such as Telstra, Cisco, and Optus/Singtel. The appointment of Simon Anderson as Executive Chairman will enable Aptira to attract new talent, secure global strategic and financial partners, and expand operations in the US and Europe.

Tristan Goode, Chief Executive Officer, Aptira, said “Simon’s tremendous industry profile and his leadership of our board from the United States will enable Aptira to identify and capitalise on the many industry opportunities we see originating from the North American market. Building upon our success as the leading provider of OpenStack in APAC, we opened our first European office in 2015 and we plan to rapidly grow the team to service the North American marketplace.”