Rancher Labs Names Peter Smails as Vice President of Marketing

Leader in open source container management software adds long-time Silicon Valley marketing executive to leadership team amidst rapid enterprise adoption and global expansion

CUPERTINO, Calif. – July 30, 2019 – Rancher Labs, the leading provider of container management software, today announced that Peter Smails has joined the company as Vice President of Marketing. Smails brings more than 25 years of experience in the enterprise software industry, having held executive roles in marketing and business development in startup and large corporate environments. In his position, Smails will be responsible for the strategy, planning, and execution of the company’s global marketing initiatives.

“Now is the right time to bring someone with Peter’s depth of experience and marketing leadership on board,” said co-founder and CEO Sheng Liang. “Our growth is driven by rapid enterprise adoption of container management software and Peter’s unique combination of marketing cutting edge technology and his experience building and scaling marketing teams is exactly what we need to take Rancher to the next stage of growth and maturity.”

A respected marketing strategist and hands-on team builder, Smails has a successful track record of evolving emerging technology vendors into mainstream enterprise technology leaders. He was most recently CMO at Imanis Data, a machine learning data management company, acquired by Cohesity. Prior to Imanis Data, Smails led marketing and business development at Datos IO, a cloud data protection company acquired by Rubrik in 2018. He has also held marketing leadership roles at technology giants including Dell EMC and Hitachi Data Systems.

“I am thrilled to be joining Rancher Labs, a company committed to the open source community while also leading the charge on enterprise adoption of containers,” said Smails. “Kubernetes is everywhere, and Rancher Labs is the only solution that provides organizations everything necessary to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale in a multi-cloud environment.”

Smails appointment continues Rancher Labs’ momentum in what has already been a banner year for the company, including:

Rapid Customer Growth – in H1’19, the number of Rancher customers grew by 52% while YoY revenue grew 161%.
Product Innovation – In H1’19 Rancher introduced major enhancements to their Rancher 2.2 product, and also launched new open source projects including Rio, Longhorn, k3s, and k3OS.
Funding – to continue fueling their growth, the company raised \$25M in Series C funding bringing the total amount raised to \$55M.

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About Rancher Labs

Rancher Labs delivers open source software that enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale, on any infrastructure across the data center, cloud, branch offices, and the network edge. With 40,000 active users and greater than 100M downloads, their flagship Rancher product is the industry’s most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform. For additional information, visit www.rancher.com and follow @Rancher_Labs on twitter. All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.

Contact:

Heather Fitzsimmons
Mindshare PR
650-279-4360
heather@mindsharepr.com