Former Cloudscaling CEO Michael Grant.
MIchael Grant is out as CEO of Cloudscaling. Company CTO and former CEO Randy Bias will act as interim CEO while a search is conducted.
In a blog post, Bias attributed the shake up to the startup’s need to act , and react, fast to changing market dynamics. He wrote:
“After discussions with the board around future directions and the evolving needs of the company, the board and Michael Grant have agreed that a change in leadership is needed. The first step in that process is to begin the search for a new CEO with experience leading business-to-business cloud product companies through the rapid adoption phase of growth.”
Grant was named CEO of Cloudscaling in February 2011, but Bias has remained the public face — and voice — of the San Francisco company. Just last week he made waves posting an open letter asking Rackspace and the rest of the OpenStack world to support — not ignore — Amazon Web Services APIs. Bias will speak again — on this topic and others — at the upcoming Structure:Europe conference in London.
Since there has been some confusion in the press as to my departure, I wanted to briefly clarify that I’m fully in support of this leadership transition for the company. Cloudscaling is evolving into a full open source and next-gen systems business, and while I have an extensive software and enterprise business background, the company needs leadership with experience rooted in open source/systems. So let’s put to rest that this is anything less than an amicable departure driven by the evolving needs of the company.