Virtualized datacenter startup Verge.io has appointed George Crump as its first chief marketing officer.
Crump was, until the end of 2022, CMO at StorONE before a series of executive changes with co-founder and CEO Gal Naor relocating from North America to Israel. Crump joined StorONE in March 2020 when it bought his 14-year-old storage research and analysis business, Storage Switzerland.
Yan Ness, Verge.io CEO, said in a statement: “There is no one in our industry with George’s reputation and credibility when it comes to identifying the right products and technologies for organizations looking to improve IT operations and reduce total cost of ownership… As our CMO, he can continue to help IT professionals address their most critical issues, like controlling cost, scaling to meet performance and capacity demands, and simplifying IT.”
Crump told Blocks & Files that he was pleased to join Verge.io, saying its technology was about bringing simplicity to hard-pressed IT executives. In a statement he said: “Verge.io and its VergeOS software embody what I’ve been advocating for years: organizations must find ways to reduce the cost and complexity of virtualization, storage, and networking infrastructures.”
Verge.io is attempting to further develop the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) concept. Its technology is based on HCI nodes, combining scale-out server compute, networking and storage under a hypervisor, and providing nested, multi-tenant, virtual datacenters for enterprises and MSPs. This is unique technology, nicely differentiated from that of Zadara, which supplies managed compute and storage services, and HCI suppliers such as Dell, Nutanix, and others.
The company was founded as Yottabyte in 2010 by VP of technology Greg Campbell, president and CEO Paul E Hodges III, and principal Duane Tursi. They developed a software-defined datacenter (SDDC) software layer called vCenter. It used commodity servers forming resource pools with compute, storage and software-defined networking. It had some success but also faced difficulties with exec changes and renamed to Verge.io in 2017-2018.
New investors bought into the company around that time and started rebuilding. The 45 employees were reduced to 15. Yann Ness became CEO in late 2021 and Mike Wall became board chair in November 2022. The company has been growing its business without classic VC funding. It added GPU support in August last year, at which point Verge.io had some 45 customers. It now calls itself an ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) technology company and wants to raise its public profile.
On that basis, Ness has appointed his first CMO and we can expect to hear a lot more from Verge.io as Crump gets to work – with a sustained barrage of webinars, white papers, brochures, blogs, customer stories, and company and product announcements.
