Mark Spowart VP and GM, OEM/ISV Business Unit, Artisan Infrastructure

Artisan Infrastructure, Inc., the wholesale IaaS provider, has appointed Mark Spowart as VP and GM of its newly formed OEM and ISV business unit.

This unit will leverage the success of Artisan Infrastructure’s wholesale IaaS model by focusing on expanding existing and new relationships with equipment and cloud ISV’s.

"Our wholesale only IaaS business model has allowed hundreds of MSP’s, Telco’s, data center operators, and ISVs to create profitable cloud practices leveraging our IaaS as their own while still maintaining full control of their customer base and service offerings," said Brian Hierholzer, CEO of Artisan Infrastructure. "With Mark Spowart’s extensive channel sales, product development, and ISV vendor background, we will expand our business by bringing this proven business model to the channel VAR’s of our OEM and ISV partners. Unfortunately, many OEM and ISV vendors have chosen to become competitors through retail and channel service offerings themselves alienating their loyal VAR and service provider customers. We see a significant need to help OEM and ISV vendors that want to maintain an ‘enabler’ role instead of a competitor role. It is with these partnerships where we will focus."

 Prior to joining Artisan Infrastructure, Spowart was CEO and co-founder of Zadara Storage, the Enterprise storage as a service company. Previously, he was president of StoreAge Networking Technologies focused on network storage virtualization. He led the company from its initial product launch through to its acquisition by LSI in 2006. At LSI he was VP of their $100M software business line with over 250 people in three countries. He has also held roles as VP of sales for QLogic, and prior to that, ATL Products where he led the company from start-up to $400M in sales, an IPO, and eventual acquisition by Quantum.

"The public cloud market is booming but, in general, the channel has been disenfranchised by the public cloud provider and now OEMs and ISVs that have become service providers themselves. Most of this business is direct with end users, creating continual conflict with the channel and is not a model most VARs or service providers will tolerate. Artisan Infrastructure’s wholesale only model allows VAR’s to leverage their trusted advisor position within IT data centers to build a very profitable cloud services practice and participate in the public cloud growth rather than fighting against it. Artisan Infrastructure is perfectly positioned to help them exploit this huge opportunity and I’m thrilled to be part of it," said Spowart.