RENO, Nev., August 1, 2023 — CIQ, a company building software infrastructure for enterprises running data-intensive workloads atop the Rocky Linux enterprise Linux distribution — has expanded its leadership team, announcing today the addition of five seasoned veterans who bring not only deep experience and passion for the technology industry but also a wealth of expertise in their respective professional domains.
Recent additions to the senior leadership team at CIQ include:
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April Mead, vice president of product — Mead, promoted from her previous position of director of product management, is an accomplished tech professional with 20-plus years of experience delivering user-centric, empathy-driven solutions across various industries. This background, along with her vast skill set and experience in both start-up and consulting environments, allows her to view technology from many perspectives and turn complex ideas into products that are delightful and easy to use.
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Tony Sheridan, vice president of security and compliance — Sheridan is a security technology and governance executive with over 30 years of experience in a variety of public and private sector organizations, including Informatica and CUNA Mutual Group. He works across CIQ to ensure security and governance best practices are developed and deployed across both the product stack and the business.
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Patricia Tantow, vice president of marketing — Tantow is a marketing executive with a well-established record of successfully positioning and growing technology brands from an early stage through acquisition or IPO. In the last 20 years, she has played a significant role in the success of numerous Silicon Valley companies such as Qualys, Splunk, Expanse (acquired by Palo Alto Networks) and Instaclustr (acquired by NetApp).
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Colin VanderSmith, vice president of product management and technology partnerships — VanderSmith brings over 20 years of industry experience as a cloud computing and technology executive at Google, Oracle and Microsoft. As head of CIQ’s cloud business, VanderSmith is accelerating CIQ’s growth strategy by building scalable cloud solutions, forming strategic technology partnerships, and simplifying customer deployments through cloud marketplaces.
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Richard Zack, vice president of professional services — Prior to joining CIQ, Zack served as the vice president of global support and professional services at Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu Linux, where he led the global teams that provide enterprise support, engineering and professional services for mission-critical workloads. Zack started his career with Linux and open source software at the age of 14, when he founded and built an early internet service provider in Ohio, using Red Hat Linux. He later founded Pantek, one of the first enterprise Linux and open source software services firms, providing distribution-agnostic support services to customers in 35 countries. Zack has experience across multiple sectors including automotive, finance, software, media, tech and telecom. He has been featured in numerous publications, including ComputerWorld, USA Today and TechCrunch, and has spoken at major conferences such as SXSW, NAB Show and OLF Conference.
“CIQ has had a very productive and eventful first half of 2023 and is fully committed to bringing new levels of value to our customers and the open source community; to that end, it is a pleasure to be able to continue expanding and growing the team,” said Gregory Kurtzer, founder and CEO of CIQ. “In our initial years as a startup, we put in place a C-suite and advisory board who collectively brought to the table a legendary degree of experience in building and running Linux-based infrastructure at scale. Now, we’re building out a talented group of veteran technology executives who can drive execution, challenge us with new ideas, and help us scale as we bring the next generation of software infrastructure to enterprises all over the world. Please join me in welcoming the new additions to CIQ’s world-class leadership team.”
