SEATTLE, Wash – September 13, 2011 - Opscode, the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that Sarah Novotny joined the company as field solutions architect. Novotny will serve as an integral part of the Opscode sales team, engaging with enterprise customers as they deploy Opscode Hosted Chef™ and Private Chef™ to realize the full benefits of their scale-out IT architectures.
"My mission at Opscode is to bridge the gap between technology and business," said Novotny. "I will be helping customers both evaluate and derive maximum business value from Opscode's Private Chef and Hosted Chef products. I will also be focused on furthering the enterprise's understanding of the devops cultural revolution and its impact on information technology."
"Sarah fully understands the tension between operations and development within enterprise organizations," said Todd Feinroth, Opscode chief revenue officer. "Sarah's vision, leadership and extensive background in operations align with Opscode's approach to helping organizations make use of Chef to seamlessly develop and deploy infrastructure in same way that code can be deployed. Sarah will also play a key role in promoting the convergence of development and operations."
Novotny was most recently with Blue Gecko, a provider of remote database-administration (DBA) services to aid small and medium-sized companies. A co-founder of Blue Gecko, she remains a shareholder and board member. Novotny also serves as chairperson of the MySQL Council at the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) and program chair of the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). A self-appointed "geek," she is an active Open Source community member and a frequent speaker at technology conventions, including her upcoming addresses at Oracle OpenWorld and LinuxCon Europe.
"The work I have done with Blue Gecko and in my community roles with OSCON have always been about encouraging and executing repeatable operations best practices in the enterprise," said Novotny. "I see tremendous opportunity to help customers understand how Chef and related products can be used in their infrastructures, and enable customers to secure buy-in from their organizations to move forward with adopting Chef."
A Michigan native, Novotny has spent the last 14 years in the Seattle area, beginning her career at Amazon as a systems administrator. Various professional stints have taken her around the globe including stops in Los Alamos, N.M.; The Hague; Tokyo; and Reno, Nev. A graduate of Fordham University in the Bronx, studying physics and math, Novotny also did graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her blog and website can be found at http://sarahnovotny.com.
Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. We help companies of all sizes develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale easily and predictably; can be quickly rebuilt in any environment; and save developers and systems engineer's time and money. Opscode's team is comprised of web infrastructure experts responsible for building and operating some of the world's largest websites and cloud computing platforms. Opscode is headquartered in Seattle.
