Venture-backed Silicon Valley distributed edge orchestration company ZEDEDA today announced it has added three industry veterans, is opening a new office in Berlin, Germany, and is actively recruiting for new talent following on customer wins, partnership announcements, and additional funding closed earlier this year.
ZEDEDA continues to develop orchestration capabilities for distributed edge computing that enable organizations to freely deploy and manage any app on any hardware at scale and connecting to any cloud or on-premises systems. Distributed edge solutions require a diverse mix of technologies and domain expertise, which has driven ZEDEDA over the past few years to develop and mature their open, vendor-agnostic orchestration solution that makes it easier to orchestrate intelligent applications at the distributed edge.
Veteran open-source developer Dr. Dmitri Chiriaev will lead the new European office in Berlin, adding to offices in San Jose (the company’s headquarters) and Bangalore and Pune, India. The company’s decision to open a Berlin office was based on growing momentum among its European customer base and a strong pool of local developer talent.
The company welcomed Darren Kimura as COO, Padraig Stapleton as VP Global Engineering, and Michael Pearl as VP Global Sales.
The moves come weeks after ZEDEDA closed a $12.5 million strategic investment round with an eye on expanding its global leadership in secure distributed edge computing.
“Since the launch of ZEDEDA’s distributed edge orchestration solution in January, demand has far surpassed our expectations,” said ZEDEDA founder and CEO Said Ouissal. “The executives joining our team bring deep expertise in operating world-class organizations and will help ZEDEDA grow and scale. And, our new Berlin office opens access to top developer talent in Europe and a new support hub for our international customers.”
Darren Kimura, who previously served as President and CEO at LiveAction (a Network Performance Management software company) and pioneered MicroCSP (Micro-scaled Concentrating Solar Power technologies) as CEO of Sopogy, joins the company as Chief Operating Officer. With experience taking three previous companies from seed stage to exit, and as a venture capitalist, Kimura will drive ZEDEDA’s go-to-market growth and strategy.
“The growth that ZEDEDA has achieved is a testament to its vision, product excellence, and execution,” Kimura said. “I’m excited to join this amazing team, driving strategy, and execution, with the goal to extend our leadership in the edge computing industry as we expand operations globally.”
Padraig Stapleton brings senior management experience in both public and pre-IPO companies to his new role as ZEDEDA’s VP of Engineering. Stapleton spent two years growing AT&T’s Big Data Development group and most recently served as chief of engineering at Mobileum. At ZEDEDA, Stapleton will coordinate the work of engineers worldwide, focusing on driving innovation and improving product quality.
“Edge computing creates a complexity within organizations, from new challenges around security, availability, networking, and more, to an immense diversity of hardware, applications, data sources and destinations, and more,” Stapleton said. “ZEDEDA’s vision of an open framework that enables organizations to easily scale their edge deployments is industry-defining, and I’m excited to join ZEDEDA to build and scale its worldwide engineering operations.”
Veteran sales executive Michael Pearl joins ZEDEDA to grow sales and drive customer engagements. Prior to ZEDEDA, Pearl spent two years leading Cisco’s Industrial IoT Americas sales team after previously serving in various IoT and networking sales and business development leadership roles at Cisco, Jasper, and Axeda. Pearl brings extensive startup experience, with expertise leading OEM sales engagements and scaling sales organizations to drive rapid revenue growth.
“As more organizations focus on automation, analytics, and AI while utilizing multi-cloud capabilities, ZEDEDA is in a unique position to help companies secure and scale the distributed computing edge while providing future proof, long-term orchestration options to our customers,” Pearl said. “I’m excited to join ZEDEDA at this pivotal stage and help define and execute on the company’s vision for expanding its sales operations.”
ZEDEDA’s European headquarters will serve as an R&D hub and support European-based customers and will be under the leadership of Dr. Chiriaev.
The Berlin hub will serve as an extension of ZEDEDA’s engineering team, initially focused on the development of the open-source EVE-OS within Project EVE in the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge organization. ZEDEDA contributed the initial code for Project EVE in 2019, with the goal of establishing an open, vendor-agnostic, and standardized architecture and operating system that streamlines the orchestration of cloud-native and legacy apps for distributed compute nodes. This team will complement the growing number of unique contributors from other organizations such as Intel, Xilinx, Timesys, and GE Research.
EVE-OS has been curated to support the unique needs of distributed edge computing and serves to unify an open ecosystem of hardware, software, and services. In this regard, EVE-OS can be thought of as “the Android of distributed edge computing,” according to a statement by the company. ZEDEDA leverages EVE-OS as the open foundation for its commercial cloud-based orchestration solution to deliver visibility, control, and security to the distributed edge at scale.
The company also announced a recruitment and hiring program; interested applicants should visit the ZEDEDA career page.
Edited by
Luke Bellos
