Introducing Anand Krishnan

Canonical’s cloud business continues to grow at great speed. Driven by the adoption of Ubuntu as the preferred operating system at both the infrastructure and guest level, partners and customers alike value the automation, interoperability, ease of use and professional services that we offer. We provide the fastest, most reliable, most up-to-date path the cloud, whether it be through a managed cloud offering, BootStack, or the leading OpenStack distribution — the Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack. We are proud to count companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Walmart, Yahoo! Japan, Wells Fargo, Bloomberg and NTT amongst our OpenStack customers. Our OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL) includes over 30 of the leading cloud software and hardware providers, putting real teeth into the promise of ecosystem interoperability. Public cloud users increasingly rely on Ubuntu for their cloud workloads, whether they are deployed on OpenStack clouds, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Compute Engine. And our engineering teams are amongst the best in the world, leveraging deep operating system knowledge to produce innovations such as Juju, MaaS and LXD.

I’m pleased to announce that as a part of this growth, we’ve recently hired Anand Krishnan to lead the Canonical cloud team. As Executive Vice President for Cloud, Anand will have responsibility for all our cloud-related sales, business-development, marketing, engineering and customer delivery activities.

Anand has a strong commercial and technical background and comes to us after a career split across Microsoft and startups. Most recently he was UK General Manager for Microsoft’s Developer Platform division and responsible for – among other things – scaling the Azure business. Before that he was responsible for launching & growing Microsoft’s cloud sales and marketing effort across 100+ subsidiaries worldwide. Before joining Microsoft, Anand was an early employee at enterprise software startup Trilogy software and held various sales & product management roles as the company scaled to $250mm+. He holds a MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Texas and an MBA from Stanford University.

Anand says: “Great businesses make an extraordinary difference to the customers they serve. Canonical has the products and the momentum to do exactly that. I couldn’t be more excited to be joining the team at this time and helping shape the next phase of our journey”

I’m thrilled to have Anand on board. He adds leadership and strength to an industry-leading cloud team. And we aren’t done yet – we’re looking for the best of the best across sales, marketing and engineering. If you want to join us, please take a look at our open roles or contact me on jane.silber@canonical.com.