We heard this morning from Intronis that the company has completed its search for a new CEO, and has formally announced that it has hired Rick Faulk as CEO and board member, effective immediately.
According to a press release issued by Intronis, Faulk has a channel background with more than 30 years of leadership experience in IT sales, marketing and operations. In addition, he also has an understanding of how to build an execute technology based on a SaaS model. Faulk specializes in accelerating growth for software businesses at various stages of the corporate lifecycle, from start-ups to $500M public companies.
Prior to joining Intronis, Faulk served as President and CEO of Landslide Technologies, the provider of Landslide CRM, a SaaS-based customer relationship management solution. After the sale of Landslide to j2 Global in 2011, Faulk became the General Manager of Cloud Services for Sales and Marketing at j2. Previously, he was President and CEO of Mzinga, a provider of business social software solutions. During Faulk’s tenure, both companies were repositioned to attain significant growth and earned prominent industry recognitions, and in addition secured new capital to fund acquisitions.
It will be interesting to see what Faulk plans for Intronis in the coming months, especially since he hails from a SaaS/cloud background, which will likely serve him well as these areas continue to expand. He definitely is no stranger to the SaaS world, having served from 2001 to 2005 as CEO of Intranets.com; he was also credited with the fast-growth turnaround and sale of the SaaS collaboration service to WebEx Communications in 2005.
“The cloud backup market is reaching a pivotal point in its maturation cycle, which makes it an exciting time to join Intronis and use my experience to help the team build a differentiated go-to-market strategy for the company and our channel partners,” says Faulk. “I am looking forward to building on our successes to make Intronis the clear market leader.”
The appointment of Faulk to the CEO post at Intronis comes amidst other executive changes that have occurred at the company in the last six or so months. Faulk replaces Kent Plunkett, who resigned his post as CEO last September. Up until Faulk’s appointment, Jay Bolgatz, the company’s VP of Engineering served as interim CEO while an executive search was conducted.
In addition, Intronis VP of Development Ted Roller departed the company in December for a VP position at LogMeIn. The role has since been filled by Neil Bradbury, Intronis’ co-founder.
