GlassHouse Taps New CEO In Cloud Services Push

GlassHouse Monday said that its board has brought on Patrick Scannell as its new CEO, effective immediately. Scannell replaces Mark Shirman, who was asked by the GlassHouse board to step down from the chief executive spot he held for more than a decade.

Jay Seaton, vice president of worldwide marketing for GlassHouse, said Scannell, who has served on GlassHouse's board for more than three years, was charged with guiding the company's growth as the demand for cloud, virtualization, security and other next-generation data center services grows.

"There's so much market excitement around everything cloud related," Seaton said.

Scannell, who is also a board member for Kiva Systems and Xtalic Corporation, last served as senior vice president and CFO of data warehousing and analytics company Netezza Inc., where he was instrumental in leading it through an IPO in July 2007 and later through Netezza's roughly $2 billion acquisition by IBM in 2010. Before Netezza, Scannell was senior vice president at self-service CRM infrastructure company Silknet, where he guided it through its public offering and subsequent sale to KANA for $4.2 billion. Scannell has also held roles of CFO and executive vice president at Applix.

"GlassHouse Technologies would like to thank Mark for his countless contributions to the company and helping to grow it to where it is today," Scannell said in a statement. "GlassHouse has built an impeccable track record over the past decade working with clients to address their growing data requirements, and is now in the envious position of having this experience and our core services emerge as fundamental elements of the rapidly developing and complex cloud marketplace. Our customers rely on GlassHouse for its vendor independent objective expertise, and now more than ever companies need this clarity amidst the market fervor for cloud direction and strategy."

Seaton said Scannell will set the tone for GlassHouse's planning, consulting and deployment offerings and help defog the move to cloud and virtualization and the effects these next-gen technologies have on IT. He'll continue GlassHouse's evolution beyond its roots in storage and backup.

"[Scannell] was brought in to help manage that anticipated growth for all of those services," Seaton said.

While Scannell has a history of taking companies public, Seaton said its focus won't be to launch a GlassHouse IPO, but instead to grow the company. GlassHouse has twice launched IPO efforts, first in 2007 and in 2010 GlassHouse filed an S-1 which is still active.

"Taking the company public is not currently our main focus, growing our company is," Seaton added.