George Karidis joins Virtuozzo as CEO

Virtualization software provider, Virtuozzo, announced the appointment of George Karidis as its Chief Executive Officer. Karidis has over 20 years of experience in the software industry and will focus on leading company growth and expansion. He will also be innovating new technology, driving new use cases for both service providers and enterprises, as well as leveraging new channels to market. The company claims to offer a complete portfolio of open source and commercial virtualization products, including production-ready containers, an optimized KVM hypervisor, and software-defined storage. Virtuozzo states to have developed the first commercially available container in 2001. Since then, the company has built out an expanded portfolio of solutions that enable the industry’s only secure system containers, as well as virtual machines and software-defined storage. “Virtuozzo has built amazing products that have established it as a leading virtualization software company with the potential to disrupt the entire market,” said Serguei Beloussov, Founder, Virtuozzo.

“George is an extremely talented senior executive with the right experience to lead the Virtuozzo team forward and provide maximum value to our customers and partners through product innovation and a bold company vision for the future.”

Previously, Karidis has served as the Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Operating Officer at cloud infrastructure platform provider, SoftLayer Technologies, which was acquired by IBM in 2013 for $2 billion. He played an integral role in building SoftLayer into one of the largest privately held cloud infrastructure services provider, with revenues approaching $400 million. In his last outfit, Karidis held the position of President, Cloud Technology Services, at CompuCom, an IT managed services and infrastructure solutions provider. He also held roles at Devonshire Investors, a private equity firm, as well as industry analyst firm The Yankee Group.

“The container phenomenon has opened up a huge and disruptive opportunity in the virtualization market, and Virtuozzo is at the heart of it with its proven, production-ready containers, and new solutions for virtual machines and storage,” said Karidis.