Rackspace product executive defects to the HP cloud

Another person at cloud and hosting provider Rackspace is heading for the exits, and this time the beneficiary is tech giant Hewlett-Packard.

Mark Interrante is joining HP as senior vice president of engineering for HP Cloud. He will be responsible for a variety of cloud and OpenStack efforts. He’ll report to executive vice president and chief technology officer Martin Fink, according to a memo Fink sent to the HP cloud people today. At Rackspace, Interrante was senior vice president of products and engineering for almost four years. He spent a few years at HP in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

He’s the latest to decamp from Rackspace, which has struggled to keep up with other cloud and hosting companies and recently retained Morgan Stanley to consider partnerships and even acquisition offers.

HP, which believes in the OpenStack open-source cloud software just like Rackspace, has also recently hired former Rackers like chief technologist Anand Bhadouria and global cloud sales guy Robert Lents in recent months.

The news about Interrante comes two weeks after VentureBeat reported that a top Rackspace executive requested a handshake agreement from a competitor, asking them not to poach Rackspace’s most effective employees. Under that requested agreement, this competitor could only make it known that it has available positions, but it could not directly pursue individual employees, a source familiar with the matter said. Rackspace has denied the existence of this agreement.

Here is Fink’s memo to employees:

To:  HP Cloud

Today, I am pleased to welcome Mark Interrante to HP as the SVP, Engineering for HP Cloud. Mark will be responsible for Cloud R&D, and Rajeev Bharadhwaj and Omri Gazitt’s teams will report to Mark, effective immediately. Our R&D teams have made great progress in the past several months.  We have restructured to focus on our new roadmap and have grown our teams from both within HP and external hiring. We have released new and exciting products such as Helion OpenStack Community, Helion OpenStack Commercial (Beta) and the Helion Development Platform (Beta) leveraging our Cloud Foundry ^TM partnership. There has also been great work done in support of the Public Cloud. Now is the time to bring in a leader to focus on the continued growth and excellence of the Cloud R&D function. Our ability to attract leaders of Mark’s caliber to the Cloud organization is further evidence of our momentum in the marketplace and of the strength of our plans.

As previously communicated, Saar Gillai will continue to lead the COO function for HP Cloud, with ownership of business development, Public Cloud operations, professional services, as well as other pan-Cloud strategy and operations functions.

Mark was most recently SVP of Products and Engineering at Rackspace, where he led the creation and growth of the product organization. Having started early in OpenStack, Mark is passionate about open source software and its potential to build communities that can change the world.

Prior to Rackspace, Mark was the GM of Yahoo Media, where he led the global product teams for Finance, News, Sports, and Entertainment. He has held technology roles at HP (Printers, Test & Measurement, HP Shopping), Deloitte Consulting, and Texas Instruments (AI and Robotics).  Mark has also held leadership roles in three startups: Spoke Software, Public Mind, and Enviz.

Mark earned a B.S. in Applied Math from the University of Texas, Dallas, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of North Texas, and a Masters Eng. in Software Engineering from the University of Florida. When not at work, Mark enjoys doing photography, traveling the world, or watching movies.

Mark will be based in Sunnyvale. Please join me in welcoming him to HP Cloud.

Regards,

Martin

Jordan Novet contributed reporting.