In April the startup Hyper9 lost his Senior R&D Scientist Schley Andrew Kutz, popular on the virtualization scene thanks to his reverse engineering work of the VMware vCenter plug-in architecture, and father of many tools that the company released in the last year.
Hyper9 hired Kutz just one year ago, bringing in his intellectual property about the Virtualization Manager Mobile and the SVMotion GUI plug-in.
Kutz moved to EMC where he’s working as Principal Software Engineer.
On top of that, Hyper9 loses today its founder and CTO Dave McCrory, virtualization.info has just learned. McCrory just left to pursue new opportunities and he’s rumored to be working on a new startup already.
So far Hyper9 had a very complex story.
Founded by McCrory and other former Surgient employees, it entered the market in November 2006 with the name of InovaWave.
It used to develop a product to optimize the VMware ESX performance (initially called DXTreme for ESX and then renamed in VirtualOctane).
In February 2008, for undisclosed reasons, the company decided to completely change its brand identity, renaming itself in Hyper9, and to completely shift its technology focus.
In June 2008 the company launched a completely different product originally called Virtual Infrastructure Search and Analytics.
The foundation of this new solution was a search engine for VMware virtual infrastructures and an approach that mimicked the one of the very popular Splunk platform.
But in a short period of time the company seems to have changed again the focus and Virtual Infrastructure Search and Analytics started to turn more into a management console, currently named Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO).
The many changes in the brand and products identity and strategy, added to the parallel efforts on partially unrelated products like the recent open source vSphere 4 simulator, are not exactly positive signs.
And now the departure of the founder of the company and one of its leading engineers is not helping to build a trust relationship with customers.
McCrory, who will stay around as Technical Advisor, has not been replaced by another Hyper9 executive.