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To everything there is a season

by Duncan Johnston-Watt

I am stepping down as CEO of Cloudsoft. After nine years at the helm it is the right time for me personally to seek out a new challenge. Cloudsoft is in great shape with new funding in place and a strong partner & customer base.

I am delighted to say that we have promoted Ross Gray who becomes our new CEO and further strengthened his leadership team with the appointment of industry veteran Steve Chambers who joins Cloudsoft as our COO early November.

We are also enhancing our board with the appointment of Andrew Parsliffe as non-executive Chairman. Andrew’s protégé Anél Jansen is also stepping up and joining the management team as our Finance Director and Company Secretary.

I will be leaving the company at the end of the year but will remain involved as founder, shareholder and chair of the company’s advisory board. Joining me on our advisory board will be my long time mentor Rich Millerwho has been involved with Cloudsoft since its inception.

In the meantime I am looking forward to attending Fujitsu Forum 2017 with Ross where our partner UShareSoft will be showcasing the integration of UForge AppCenter and Cloudsoft AMP in their latest feature pack. For background on this integration check out the 451 Webinar: Automating for Agility, Control and Consistency in a Multi-Cloud Environment featuring our CTO & Co-founder Alex Heneveld along with UShareSoft’s CTO & Co-founder James Weir.

Then it is off to New York to introduce Steve to the world of Blockchain at Blockchain for Wall Street plus some of our key financial services clients. Now in its second year this is a great high bandwidth event presented by the Wall Street Blockchain Alliance and produced by Lighthouse Partners | The Blockchain Conference.

Finally I will be at AWS re:Invent. Having attended the very first event it will be very interesting to see how it has grown in the intervening years. There is a great blog post from Benjamin Wootton at Contino that highlights why he thinks re:Invent 2017 could be a pivotal event coinciding as it does with a significant ramp up in cloud adoption by the enterprise.

That is precisely why I’ll be there.

In particular, I am looking forward to session MSC201 on the AWS Service Catalog at 4PM on Wednesday November 29th. This could be a pivotal moment for Cloudsoft too but more on that another time. For now I will leave you with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band and their live performance of Turn! Turn! Turn! featuring Roger McGuinn.

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