Greylock Partners, seeking more operational experience in the enterprise sector, named Dev Ittycheria, an operations guy who made his name in enterprise software, as its newest partner.
VCs and startups alike have been in the hunt for operational smarts in the enterprise arena of late. That demand likely will keep growing as the big data wave builds. Splunk went public with much ballyhoo a few weeks ago; Greylock portfolio companies Palo Alto Networks and Service-Now are expected to follow in the near future. Sumo Logic, another Greylock-funded company, emerged from stealth mode in January and will take on Splunk in the big data analysis arena. Other Greylock enterprise-oriented companies include SaaS startup Workday, founded by former PeopleSoft CEO Dave Duffield and Hadoop fan favorite Cloudera.
Ittycheria co-founded BladeLogic — a provider of server-and-storage configuration and management tools – in 2001. He led it as CEO and president and sold it to BMC seven years later for $ 900 million. He stayed on to lead BMC’s $ 1.4 billion enterprise service management business. He is also a board member for AthenaHealth and AppDynamics, a Greylock-backed company. Before BladeLogic, he co-founded Applica, an early cloud computing company.
Ittycheria will work out of Greyhill’s Menlo Park, Calif., office and focus on enterprise-focused cloud-based services and IT infrastructure. Greylock partner Asheem Chandna said Ittycheria’s expertise will be invaluable to the company. In a blog post, Chandna wrote:
“Having founded two companies, Dev understands that building great technology is not enough, and that equal effort needs to go into the design, construction and management of the company’s distribution channel.”
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities
- 2012: The Hadoop infrastructure market booms
- Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
