Canadian networking software startup Kaloom appointed former IBM executive George Khatchadourian as EVP of Strategic Partnerships, tasking him with advancing its collaborative efforts and go-to-market strategy.
A Kaloom representative told Fierce its go-to-market strategy is focused on working with OEM solution providers who bundle its technology in with their own edge infrastructure offerings covering servers, storage, management and orchestration. Current partners in this category include IBM and Lenovo, with the representative noting “Kaloom is in various stages of establishing partnerships with additional OEM solution providers.”
The representative added Kaloom is working with system integration partners including Capgemini Engineering and Wipro as well as regional resellers. “As we scale, we look forward to adding partners in all the above mentioned categories,” the representative said. The company also aims to “create demand and credibility” for its technology by working with ecosystem partners, the representative noted.
In addition to leading and expanding the company’s relationships with IBM and other strategic partners, Khatchadourian is charged with building up a larger customer base for IBM Cloud Satellite and other enterprise and private 5G solutions which use Kaloom’s technology.
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Khatchadourian notably spent more than three decades at IBM, most recently serving as COO of IBM Americas. Before that, he held positions as COO of IBM Japan; VP of Strategy and Transformation for Global Markets; and VP of Service Delivery at IBM Japan. His LinkedIn profile shows he left IBM in March.
His appointment follows the recent hire of Stéphane Boisvert, another IBM alum who also held executive roles at Pivotal Software, Bell and Sun Microsystems, as Kaloom’s president in May.
Boisvert said in a statement Khatchadourian’s “experience will help to deliver on Kaloom’s vision of a fully programmable and automated distributed cloud edge propelled by 5G, AI and IoT, and his role will support important relationships that will drive our global sales and go-to-market initiatives and achieve company success.”
Founded in 2014, Kaloom rolled out a Software Defined Fabric for data centers in 2018 and followed with a Cloud Edge Fabric for distributed edge locations in early 2019. In April 2020, the company teamed with IBM subsidiary Red Hat to blend its Cloud Edge Fabric with the latter’s OpenShift platform. In October 2020, it joined the partner ecosystem for IBM’s Cloud for Telecommunications offering.
Kaloom recently scored some fresh funding to fuel its expansion ambitions. In May, the company announced Alternative Capital Group as its new majority shareholder, bringing its total Series A funding to $32.5 million. The figure marked a jump from a total of $20.7 million as of its last funding announcement in November 2018.
In its May announcement, Kaloom said it is in active proof-of-concept trials with more than 10 tier-one global operators. The representative told Fierce it is also in field trials with “a few” tier-one operators which plan to deploy its programmable fabric as a containerized function.