Peter Crook, new President and CEO of Upsite Technologies, has returned to the company in another position of leadership, a hire recently featured by Mission Critical. From the article:
Upsite Technologies, Inc. has named Peter Crook as president and chief executive officer, a position he held from 2003-2009, alongside founder and CTO Kenneth Brill. Crook will assume the position effective January 20, 2014.
Crook brings more than twenty-five years of executive management experience as startup CEO, vice president, product manager and sales and marketing manager in the software, services and manufacturing spaces. Crook comes to Upsite Technologies from EA2, an executive management consulting company that focuses on business, organizational and product development for small and medium sized high-tech companies, where he served as managing director. Prior to Crook’s previous tenure with Upsite, he was vice president of development for LizardTech (acquired by Celartem/Extensis) and drove the commercial development of MrSID, now a global geospatial standard for image storage and retrieval. This work set up additional research that contributed to open source in the GIS community and the integration of JPEG 2000 technology.
“We are delighted to have an industry veteran like Peter take the leadership role at Upsite Technologies,” said Mark Germagian, CTO of Geist Global and executive board member of Upsite Technologies. “Peter’s deep knowledge of the data center market and IT product development will greatly benefit the company as it prepares to launch a new suite of products.”
During his time at EA2, Crook had the opportunity to collaborate with the Uptime Institute, an organization charged with providing conferences and seminars, independent research, and thought leadership for the enterprise data center industry and for data center professionals. While under contract for the Uptime Institute, Crook was instrumental in the development of the organization’s Management and Operations (M&O) Stamp of Approval. The M&O Stamp of Approval provides data centers with third party assurance that the facility conforms to industry-recognized guidelines for 24X7 uptime. To date, the M&O Stamp of Approval has been awarded to some of today’s leading data center operators including Equinix, Fortrust, Fortune Data Centers, and Interxion.
