Hostway Appoints Former Cognizant Exec As New CEO

Managed hosting and cloud provider Hostway appointed Robert Boles as its new CEO Thursday.

Boles succeeds John Martis, who also has been newly appointed as the Chicago-based company's COO. As the former vice president of Cognizant, an IT sourcing business listed as No. 10 on the Solution Provider 500 list, Boles plans to bring his experience in infrastructure to serve small and midsize businesses and further expand Hostway's IaaS solutions and delivery models.

"If you look at where the market in general is going, small and large companies are both moving to a platform-type delivery model, or as-a-service delivery model," said Boles. "In my experience, I launched data and cloud services at Cognizant for larger enterprises, but now I will be focusing on small-market needs adopting consumption IT."

[Related: CRN's 2014 Managed Services Provider 500 ]

Currently, the cloud and managed services market is merging together and there is no avoiding that, said Boles.

"When you talk about managed services and cloud, they are inevitably going to come together," said Boles. "Some [companies] will leverage public, hybrid, private or dedicated cloud, and they want it all managed to deliver applications that fulfill technical and compliant requirements."

Boles' plan for Hostway includes building upon the company's foundation and adding different cloud-based functionalities in a bundled package, he said.

"We have a broad base of services and large client space, and we're looking to add an Infrastructure-as-a-Service layer, and add more capabilities above that, such as application and service levels on what we build and do with our partners," said Boles.

On the partner side, Boles said Hostway will introduce a new private-label, turnkey cloud reseller platform for SMB VARs on Feb. 24 at Parallels Summit 2014 in New Orleans. The platform, which accompanies Hostway's existing white-label services offerings, is designed to help channel partners integrate Hostway services into their own automating platforms and solutions, Boles said.

Going forward, hosting and cloud services will be increasingly critical to SMBs, Boles said, which will mean big growth for the cloud and managed services markets.

"If you look at the hosting market and cloud market, the midsize clients want to be able to move rapidly, have flexibility and have the same type of enterprise class to compete with their large competitors," said Boles. "They are looking to compete on a more leveled field, which will further drive and bring in revenue."

PUBLISHED FEB. 20, 2014