SEATTLE, Wash. – April 28, 2015 –Skytap, Inc., the leading provider of on-demand Environments as a Service (EaaS), today announced the opening of a new London office to service the European market, in response to growing enterprise adoption of DevOps tools in the region. To spearhead the expansion, Skytap has appointed former HP global sales executive, Chris Griggs as Vice President of EMEA, and former VMware architect, Rick Cronin as Technical Director. This announcement follows the company’s recent extension of customer access to Skytap through IBM Softlayer’s London-based datacenter, which has further accelerated adoption of their virtual dev/test environments.
A recent market trend report from Gartner predicts that within the next year five percent of Global 2000 organizations will be adopting some form of DevOps technology. Fueling that demand will be technologies like Skytap, which support the DevOps toolchain and are forecasted to grow 21 percent worldwide. This demand is consistent with the growth Skytap is experiencing in the UK across key verticals including telco, retail, hospitality and financial services with customers already adopting Skytap’s technology.
“Enterprises rely on 1E’s solutions to simplify and speed up their complete software lifecycle,” said Dave Fuller, Global Technical Training Manager at 1E, a UK-based Skytap customer. “Skytap delivers our globally-dispersed team the critical support and backbone we require to successfully educate our staff, partners, and customers to deliver efficiencies and cost savings to some of the world’s biggest companies.”
“We’re seeing rapid expansion of Skytap’s customer base into our IBM SoftLayer London data center,” said Thor Culverhouse, CEO of Skytap. “Due to the demands we’re seeing, we chose to heavily invest in the UK – specifically we’re seeing customers avoid derailing issues by running Skytap on SoftLayer within their software development lifecycle, which allows for their teams to deliver software faster while retaining the quality.”
Skytap’s newest hires, Griggs and Cronin, were chosen to lead the company’s expansion efforts based on their deep history of successfully working in partnerships while at both HP and Stratavia. Most recently, Griggs served as director of global accounts for Hewlett-Packard (HP) where he launched the company’s DevOps initiatives. Cronin’s prior experience includes roles as a senior enterprise architect at VMware and HP’s DevOps Ambassador.
“Coming from the DevOps world at HP, Rick and I have a unique perspective on the customer landscape, and the challenges large enterprises face in cloud-based dev/test environments,” said Griggs. “The opening of Skytap’s London office gives us an opportunity to share that knowledge and those best practices with more customers, and I anticipate our stable of enterprise users in the region will grow rapidly over the coming months and years as Skytap continues to expand its global partner ecosystem.”
To hear more from Griggs and Cronin about Skytap’s expansion vision please read their recent interview at: https://www.skytap.com/blog/skytap-devops-british-invasion/.
About Skytap, Inc.
Skytap provides Environments-as-a-Service (EaaS) to transform the software development lifecycle and help customers deliver better software, faster. Today’s enterprise is challenged to continuously deliver new customer-facing applications, while overcoming increasing change and complexity in IT infrastructures. Our customers use Skytap to manage, share, deploy and decommission on-demand environments that contain everything needed to collaborate at each phase of the SDLC, without unnecessary costs and project delays due to manual configuration and dependencies. Enterprise IT organizations maintain full visibility and cost control, while allowing dev and test teams to self-provision labs and share complex environments with ease, for a lasting boost to agile DevOps initiatives. To try Skytap and learn more, visit www.skytap.com.
Social Media
Follow Skytap on Twitter: @Skytap, @Skytap_Partners
Follow Skytap on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/skytap
Follow Chris Griggs on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisgriggs
Follow Rick Cronin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickcronin
