CloudBees, Inc., the Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) innovator, announced that Michel Goossens, former vice president EMEA for Red Hat, has joined the company as vice president of European sales. Goossens brings over 20 years of industry experience to CloudBees, with more than 10 years specifically focused in the middleware business. At a time of exceptional demand for the CloudBees Platform, Goossens will drive growth across the region as momentum for PaaS grows.
Goossens brings a wealth of success in technology sales and marketing to CloudBees. He comes to CloudBees from e-commerce platform provider Magento, where he was vice president and general manager of EMEA. He rapidly built a successful sales and marketing team and, at the same time, developed a strong ecosystem of partners. In August 2011, Magento was acquired by eBay.
Goossens’ career includes significant experience selling middleware and open source technology. Prior to Magento, he served as vice president for JBoss EMEA and, after Red Hat acquired JBoss, he continued in the same role, growing JBoss revenue substantially throughout the European region. He also served as vice president EMEA for both Novell and SilverStream. Goossens holds a degree in computer science from Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (EPHEC) in Brussels, Belgium.
“I have worked very closely with Michel throughout my tenure at JBoss and Red Hat. I am very honored to have him join the CloudBees team. Besides the technology depth he brings to his new role, he understands how to help companies adopt new technologies, as well as how to be more efficient building and managing applications,” said Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder, CloudBees. “European organisations are seeing that the CloudBees Java PaaS empowers development to focus all of their time building value for the organisation. Business-critical applications are delivered more quickly, more cost effectively and with higher quality. At this stage in our growth, the leadership and success Michel brings to our European operations is a real asset for CloudBees.”
“I am delighted to be at CloudBees. The CloudBees Platform is clearly the leader for Java PaaS application development and deployment,” said Michel Goossens, vice president of European sales, CloudBees. “European companies are realising the value they can derive from PaaS. I have made it a priority to get out and meet CloudBees customers and partners. They tell me that time to market pressures are continually increasing. By using the CloudBees Platform, they are better able to deliver quality applications more quickly, thus addressing business needs and meeting competitive challenges with far more agility than ever before.”
CloudBees has grown new customer acquisition substantially over the last year or so in Europe. Overall, the company experienced a 10x growth factor at the end of 2011, versus the prior year. During this same period, several new System Integrator (SI) relationships were also established. The rapid growth reflects the adoption of the CloudBees’ PaaS for end-to-end Java application development and deployment. Additionally, with the CloudBees AnyCloud™ deployment options, European customers can deploy their applications within Europe – with a public or private hosting service, or on-premise in their own data center. This flexibility addresses both regulatory requirements and transaction latency concerns.