In a significant move resulting from mounting years of fast growth and widening market demand for its secure cloud offerings, FireHost, the secure cloud company, announced today the appointment of technology veteran Jim Lewandowski as its new chief executive officer (CEO). This move occurs in concert with founder and former CEO Chris Drake’s decision to take the reins as the company’s chief technology officer (CTO). Together, the CEO and CTO appointments accelerate FireHost’s effort to grow, innovate, and deliver secure clouds that fill a void in a cloud provider market clamouring for greater, more effective security.
Lewandowski is a seasoned cloud and security veteran, bringing with him more than 25 years of executive leadership with companies like Rackspace, McAfee, Yahoo!, BMC Software, and IBM. He was most recently a senior vice president and general manager at Rackspace before establishing a technology consulting business.
Drake, who founded FireHost in 2009 and launched its secure cloud in 2011, has served as CEO since its inception. During his tenure, he led the technology development in addition to establishing its business presence around the world – a presence that has grown immensely in various industries, such as healthcare, retail, financial services, and the public sector. Along the way, the company has doubled revenue in each of the past three years.
Lewandowski built a reputation leading great teams that delivered exceptional revenue and profit growth for a number of companies in the cloud, security, software, and enterprise markets. In addition to his work at Rackspace, he served as executive vice president of the Americas at McAfee, vice president of business and enterprise sales at Yahoo!, vice president of sales at BMC Software, and business unit executive for storage systems products at IBM.
Lewandowski already serves on FireHost’s board of directors.
As the new CTO, Drake will concentrate more time on FireHost’s innovation. The leadership changes announced today will fuel the company’s growth as his team accelerates its technology innovation and delivers it to customers.
Under Drake’s leadership, FireHost successfully expanded its secure cloud from the Americas to the European and Asia market, created FluidScale, the industry’s only rebootless scaling technology, designed the highest-performing cloud infrastructure available, and blocked more than 100 million hack attempts against its customer base in 2013 via the company’s unique Intelligent Security Model.
FireHost has already established a much-needed position in the marketplace as the leader in secure clouds. The company’s quick emergence results from its unflinching belief that cloud customers should not settle for poor security that exposes them to hacking disasters.
