DEVOPSdigest

Fugue has hired Phillip Merrick as CEO.

Merrick will drive strategy and lead the company’s day-to-day operations across product, marketing and sales. Drawing on more than 20 years of experience growing enterprise software and SaaS companies, he will also lead Fugue’s efforts to educate the market about technology that changes the way enterprises address issues such as policy compliance and configuration drift in the cloud.

As founder and CEO, Merrick took webMethods public in 2000 in what was at the time the most successful software IPO to date. He grew the company’s revenue to $202 million by 2003, the strongest growth of any U.S. software company during that time. More recently, he transformed SparkPost from an on-premises email software vendor to a leader in cloud email delivery, growing recurring revenues by over three times during his tenure while being profitable in the past two years.

“There aren’t too many people qualified to run a rapidly growing software company with first-class financial backing and market-creating technology, but Phillip fits the bill,” said Josh Stella, Fugue’s co-founder and CTO. “Bringing Phillip on board will allow me to devote 100 percent of my time to the product. I’m a technologist at heart, and this gives me the opportunity to further develop Fugue’s technology. We spent the last year building an incredible team, and I’m confident that Phillip will help us grow into the company we’re capable of being.”

“I’m joining a fantastic company and team at just the right time,” said Merrick. “In my time helping companies grow their footprints in the cloud, I have become acutely aware of the need for assurance that security and compliance policies are always enforced. Only Fugue’s technology can provide this assurance with policy as code coupled with automated remediation. Josh and his team have created a strong foundation, and I am excited to help the company capitalize on it.”

Beyond his success as a technology executive, Merrick is the co-inventor and pioneer of web services and software integration technologies covered by multiple U.S. patents, including the technology leading to SOAP and REST-based web services. He is also co-inventor of VisualCV, a web-enabled, multimedia resume service with two million users. Merrick was named Entrepreneur of the Year in 2000 by both Ernst & Young and KPMG, “Tech Titan” of 2011 by Washingtonian Magazine and “CEO of the Year” in 2016 by the Tech Council of Maryland.