Virtual Iron to Refocus Company With New CEO

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization and virtual infrastructure software, has made a company change at the top as it announced a new CEO who plans on changing the focus of the company to help maximize their market opportunity.

Replacing John C. Thibault as the company’s CEO is Ed Walsh, a former EMC executive. Thibault will remain with the company in the role of executive chairman of the board, and helping to focus on the company’s strategic direction.

Walsh most recently served as vice president and general manager of EMC’s Information Management Software Group after the storage giant acquired Avamar Technologies, Inc. where Walsh was CEO and led the company to 700% revenue growth over an 18 month period.

With his track record, Virtual Iron hopes that Walsh will bring the right combination of strategic partner, channel go-to-market and product leadership experience to build on the company’s current market position and to help accelerate the company’s growth in order to get them to the next level.

In addition to hiring Walsh, Virtual Iron has also hired John McCarthy, another former EMC executive. McCarthy joins Virtual Iron as its senior vice president of sales, and in that role, he will lead the company’s worldwide sales, channel and field operations.

Virtual Iron is competing in a fast-growing server virtualization market with the potential for a huge amount of growth. Industry experts expect software sales to grow to $7 billion in 2011 from $800 million in 2006. Current penetration of virtualization on installed x86 servers is estimated at somewhere between 6 and 9 percent today, leaving a huge untapped market for Virtual Iron and its competitors to go after.

VMware is currently dominating this market, and the company’s recent financial results prove that the virtualization giant is still growing at a healthy rate. Virtual Iron finds itself in a position where they need to prove they are a viable alternative to VMware in order to succeed in their land grab.

From a marketing perspective, Virtual Iron has had a similar story and a closer competition with another Xen-based server virtualization company called XenSource who was recently acquired by Citrix. And with Citrix changing the XenSource marketing strategy to an “end-to-end” play in order to grab new marketshare, it is clear that Walsh and McCarthy are going to need something more than just a “less expensive” alternative story to quickly grab more marketshare than Thibault and crew were already accomplishing.

“Virtual Iron has fundamentally changed the landscape in server virtualization by eliminating the primary obstacles to mainstream market growth,” said Ed Walsh, new president and CEO of Virtual Iron. “By reducing complexity without sacrificing capability, the company delivers on the demands of a huge segment of the virtualization market and creates a tremendous opportunity for success.”