New VP, new business for Cray

Cray has been in the process of formalizing a new line of business for at least a couple of months. Its “custom engineering” business will help customers with specialized requirements get access to Cray’s engineering bench to help them build custom solutions

“Our custom engineering efforts are focused on leveraging our supercomputing technology, experience and innovation and tailoring these into computing, storage and consulting solutions designed to meet very specific customer needs,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “We are very excited to have Skip help us continue to grow and expand in this important aspect of our business and add to the overall strength of our leadership team.”

From what I understand, the team will focus not just on tweaking Cray gear for special installations, but on addressing customer needs and building solutions out of whatever technologies make sense. I would expect, however, that the Cray stockroom would be the first stop.

This week the company announced the leadership for the new business

Cray Inc. today announced the appointment of John “Skip” Richardson to the position of vice president of business development for the company’s custom engineering team. With more than 20 years of business development experience in the technology and aerospace industries, Richardson will be responsible for promoting Cray’s custom engineering solutions to government agencies, commercial customers and systems integrators.

…Prior to joining Cray, Richardson served as vice president of corporate business development at Sarnoff, Inc., a subsidiary of SRI International, where he was responsible for managing and growing business-to-business and government contracts in research and development for U.S. Department of Defense and commercial clients. Prior to Sarnoff, Richardson held various business development roles at Digimarc, IBM, Halliburton and Honeywell.