Krishnan will lead Canonical’s cloud efforts

Canonical has appointed former Microsoft exec Anand Krishnan to the role of executive vice president for cloud, where he will lead most of the company’s cloud-related efforts globally including business-development, marketing, engineering and customer delivery activities.

Krishnan most recently served as UK General Manager for Microsoft’s Developer Platform division where he was responsible in part for scaling the Azure business, which by most measures seems to be growing at record pace. Before joining Microsoft in 2004 he spent about five years at Trilogy, a Texas-based software firm specialising in lead generation solutions for the automotive, insurance and telecoms sectors.

“Great businesses make an extraordinary difference to the customers they serve. Canonical has the products and the momentum to do exactly that,” Krishnan said.

“I couldn’t be more excited to be joining the team at this time and helping shape the next phase of our journey”

Canonical has in recent months moved to bolster its cloud strategy with BootSack, its managed private cloud offering, and its own distribution of OpenStack. Its Linux distro Ubuntu is the most popular OS in use on AWS EC2 (though other Linux incumbents have questioned those claims), and it also recently launched Ubuntu Core, a slimmed-down, re-architected version of the Ubuntu operating system that borrows from heavily from the Linux container (isolated frameworks) and mobile (transactional updates) worlds.