Virtela Taps Steven R. King as Prez, CEO to Accelerate ‘NaaS’ Effort

Virtela today revealed that Steven R. King has taken the helm as president and CEO and a board member.

The move is aimed at helping the company, which over the past couple years has been successfully run by a triumvirate of VPs, to expand its managed services/SaaS portfolio and drive growth.

The Denver, Colo.-based company provides enterprise customers with such solutions as MPLS- and IP-based VPNs; security services based on a SaaS model; remote monitoring and management of WAN/LAN infrastructure; and converged data, video and voice. The company has seen seven consecutive quarters of positive net income, and sales orders jumped 40 percent in the first quarter of 2008 over the same period last year.

But the company believes there is even more upside to the “network as a service” opportunity, as Virtela calls it, and so has brought in King to “bring fresh perspective” and lead the charge, he told xchange.

The company expects to divulge more details about its accelerated strategy and the specific services it will entail later, probably in the second half of this year, King said.

Most recently King headed ZANTAZ Inc., which under his seven-year leadership grew to be profitable and was recently acquired by The Autonomy Group.

King told xchange on Tuesday there are many parallels between Virtela and ZANTAZ, which provided managed and SaaS-based services, including storage as service, for enterprises.

“I’m a big believe in that model,” he said, adding Virtela aims to target the global mid-market, which it believes is underserved. “We saw how powerful it can be to create a set of solutions which businesses don’t typically have the assets to deploy themselves.”

Prior to ZANTAZ, King held a number of executive positions at E*TRADE Group Inc., helping to grow the company to more than $1.5 billion in revenue.

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