SEATTLE – August 26, 2013 – Opscode® today announced Barry Crist has been appointed as CEO and Chairman of the company’s Board of Directors. Former CEO Mitch Hill is stepping down to address a personal health issue and will remain on the company’s Board. Mr. Crist spent the last five months as Opscode’s Vice President, Enterprise, successfully leading enterprise customer engagement for the company. Prior to Opscode, Mr. Crist served as CEO of Likewise, Inc. where he built an open source, free-to-premium sales model that reached more than 100,000 organizations worldwide.
“We’re rooting for Mitch as he focuses on his health and thankful for his tremendous leadership in building Opscode into a market leader,” said Barry Crist, CEO, Opscode. “We are in the midst of a massive change in the enterprise and we’re incredibly fortunate that Chef is at its epicenter. Opscode’s focus will be on empowering our customers to transform their businesses with Enterprise Chef.”
“Under Mitch’s leadership Opscode has become one of the most promising and disruptive next-generation technology leaders,” said John Connors, Managing Partner at Ignition Partners. “Barry Crist’s broad experience and stellar track record combined with his unique expertise building a successful open source-based company makes him the right leader for the next generation of growth at Opscode.”
Opscode also today announced two other executive appointments. Co-Founder Adam Jacob will now serve as Chief Dev Officer and will be leading Opscode’s product engineering team. Mr. Jacob previously served as the company’s Chief Customer Officer. In addition, Paul Edelhertz will now serve as Senior Vice President of Customer Operations, driving enterprise adoption and customer success with Enterprise Chef™. Edelhertz previously served as Vice President of the company’s Services and Community organizations.
Opscode recently announced that Fortune 1000 companies represent 60 percent of Opscode’s total sales and that the company’s Fortune 1000 customer base has grown by more than 150 percent since June 30, 2012. To capitalize on this enterprise demand, Opscode recently expanded its Enterprise Chef automation platform with capabilities for networking and storage.
Prior to serving as CEO of Likewise, Mr. Crist served as Vice President of the Application Management group at Mercury, now a division of HP, where he grew North American sales from less than $1 million to more than $75 million in annual revenue. Prior to his time at Mercury Interactive, Mr. Crist spent time in sales leadership at Network Associates (now McAfee) and technical, sales, and international roles at Apple.
About Opscode
Opscode is the provider of Chef, the automation platform for the coded business. Opscode Chef provides the speed, flexibility, and efficiency to compete in the digital economy. By modeling IT infrastructure and application delivery as code, Chef empowers businesses of all sizes to easily scale to meet demand, eliminate down time, manage complexity, and accelerate time to market. www.opscode.com.
