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Linux and Open Source Veterans Sign On to Form CIQ Leadership Team

CIQ team is building the next generation of enterprise high-performance computing with Rocky Linux

**RENO, Nev.—August 31, 2022—**Nine cloud and Linux veterans have signed on to form the leadership team for CIQ, the company building the next generation of software infrastructure for enterprises running data-intensive workloads atop the Rocky Linux enterprise Linux distribution. This follows a successful funding round in May and a teaming with Google Cloud in July.

CIQ secured $26 million in Series A funding in May, led by Two Bear Capital, with the goal of building a suite of enterprise workflow orchestration and hybrid cloud solutions designed to support enterprises as compute-intensive workloads like high-performance computing (HPC) grow to include non-traditional workloads like high-end data analytics and AI/ML models, both on premises and in the cloud. In July, Google Cloud announced that it had made its optimized version of Rocky Linux generally available to users of their cloud infrastructure service.

“The next generation of software infrastructure that we’re building at CIQ will help enterprises and organizations tackle data-intensive workflows—from big data analytics, to HPC for modeling and simulation, to training sophisticated machine learning models,” said Gregory Kurtzer, founder and CEO of CIQ. “The CIQ team has a legendary degree of experience building and running Linux-based infrastructure at scale for some of the most demanding applications. From the base operating system, through cloud, VMs, containers, all the way up to the top of a unified application stack, the CIQ team uniquely understands the point of view of customers across a diversity of industries. Together we’re developing a game plan that will show enterprises how to embrace the future of software infrastructure with greater speed, less risk and a shorter path to success.”

The senior leadership team at CIQ now includes:

  • Robert Adolph, co-founder and chief product officer—Adolph has introduced disruptive innovations in technology and business strategy for the past 25 years. He has integrated engineering, and research and development experience with large partners and customers specialized in engineering, computing, digital and project management. Adolph has been an advisory board member and angel investor in many start-ups and is a premium partner for customers on innovative project development.

  • Rob Dufalo, SVP engineering—Dufalo has worked on both ends of the computing spectrum, delivering solutions for the second largest search engine in the world and working on IoT and embedded computing solutions for over 20 years. He has extensive experience in development, quality management and in operating cloud native solutions.

  • John Frey, CTO—Frey has spent the last 20 years of his career creating partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, and operating cost efficiency. His primary focus is using his research and engineering experience to apply machine learning with data-driven insights to solve HPC and cloud computing solutions to CIQ’s current product stack. 

  • Gregory M. Kurtzer, co-founder and CEO—Kurtzer is a 20+ year veteran in Linux, open source and HPC. He is well known in the HPC space for designing scalable and easy-to-manage secure architectures for innovative performance-intensive computing while working for the U.S. Department of Energy and a joint appointment to UC Berkeley. Kurtzer founded and led several large open source projects such as CentOS Linux, the Warewulf and PERCEUS cluster toolkits, the container system Singularity, and most recently, the successor to CentOS, Rocky Linux.

  • David LaDuke, VP marketing—LaDuke is a former marketing executive at Apple and NeXT, having started his career in open source as a founder and CMO at Linuxcare. He went on to found Sputnik, the world’s first cloud solution for managing guest Wi-Fi networks. Sputnik merged with Lokket in 2017 to form what is today a growing wireless internet service provider (WISP) focused on providing affordable broadband to schools and underserved communities across the U.S.

  • Stephen Moody, SVP support and technology—Moody is a technology executive, formerly at MIW for over 15 years, where he has developed patented products that focus on utilizing green technologies. His experience with IBM, Boeing, Microsoft, Rackable Systems and ZT Systems has given him the opportunity to leverage his ability to build high-performing technology teams and solutions.

  • Marlin Prager, CFO—Prager has over 26 years of experience in the media and entertainment industries where he has been directly involved in equity, debt, and merger and acquisitions deals totaling more than $10 billion. He formerly was with Legendary Entertainment, which was acquired by Wanda in 2016. He then worked on several start-up projects including Open Drives and Illuscio before joining CIQ. Prager was formerly a partner at W2 Films and also founded Digital Cinema Ventures, supporting the rollout of digital projectors in theaters. Prager began his career with Price Waterhouse, where he earned his CPA.

  • Brock Taylor, VP HPC and strategic partners—Taylor brings over 20 years experience working in the silicon industry at Intel Corporation and most recently AMD. He has held positions of solutions architect, manager and director for HPC systems, roles in which he focused his efforts on abstracting away the complexities of HPC systems from users to help expand access of these technologies across scientific and engineering domains.

  • Art Tyde, VP business development—Tyde is a 30-year veteran of open source with significant technology sales and engineering experience in both start-ups and the enterprise. Tyde is credited as the founder of the enterprise Linux services and support industry, having founded the San Francisco (and Silicon Valley) Bay Area Linux Users Group in 1994 and co-founded Linuxcare with CIQ VP marketing, David LaDuke.

The CIQ suite of tools is designed to leverage the capabilities of Rocky Linux, which is the successor to CentOS. Red Hat is moving CentOS to end-of-life status and will eventually no longer support it. Kurtzer, founder and CEO of CIQ, is also the founder of Rocky Linux and an original founder of CentOS. Rocky Linux is a community-led project, managed by the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation.

About CIQ

CIQ powers the next generation of software infrastructure, leveraging capabilities from enterprise, cloud, hyperscale and HPC. From the base operating system, through containers, orchestration, provisioning, computing, and up to cloud applications, CIQ works with every part of the technology stack to drive solutions for customers and communities with stable, scalable, secure production environments. CIQ is the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux, and the creator of the next generation federated computing stack. For more information, please visit ciq.com.