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Faction Appoints Key Executives to Drive Hypergrowth and Industry Leadership in Multi-Cloud Services
[May 14, 2019]

Faction Appoints Key Executives to Drive Hypergrowth and Industry Leadership in Multi-Cloud Services


DENVER, May 14, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Faction, the leading multi-cloud Managed Service Provider, today announced key appointments in the executive leadership team to deliver the next phase of company expansion. The additions to the executive team bring decades of business leadership experience in high tech and managed service industries. These changes come at a critical time as Faction readies to scale further into global locations, deepen key alliances, and deliver portfolio expansion for multi-cloud. These additions follow closely behind a recent $14M financing round.

Two of Faction’s leaders are transitioning into new positions. Sean Charnock is taking over the CEO role. Luke Norris, Faction’s Founder and original CEO, is moving to Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer. They are joined by Pete Bell, SVP of Sales, and Duan van der Westhuizen, VP of Marketing. With this leadership team, the company is poised for significant growth in 2019 and beyond.

Charnock takes on the CEO position following his time as President, which he took on late in 2018, when he moved from Faction’s board into an operating role. “Sean and I have a great history together and this is a long-formed aspiration of ours. Joining as a board member and investor in early 2018, Sean’s impact was immediate. Our shared vision for the opportunities in front of us makes this partnership between the two of us extremely exciting,” says Norris.

Charnock has a proven track record of extensive leadership experience in the high-tech industries spanning infrastrcture as a service (IaaS), cyber security, and telecommunications. His career includes prior executive leadership positions at ISIGHT (FireEye), The Planet, and Efficient Networks (Siemens). As one of the founders of Softlayer, he helped grow the company to one of the biggest privately held cloud infrastructure providers in the world. Softlayer was acquired by IBM in 2013 to underpin a new IBM Cloud Services Division, recently renamed to IBM Cloud.



“I am extremely excited to be leading the Faction team,” said Charnock. “The company is significantly outpacing our competition with rapid product innovation. The advances with our key partners will continue to increase this divide over the next 12 to 24 months. Multi-cloud continues to be the dominant model for enterprise IT. I look forward to working alongside Luke and the entire Faction staff to capitalize on the amazing opportunity in front of us.”

Norris has been the driving force behind Faction’s expansion from a hosted private cloud provider to a leader in multi-cloud services. With Charnock on board, Norris’ focus transitioned away from daily operations. He continuously drives Faction’s vision and innovation, emphasizing Faction’s key partnerships and technology portfolio.


Pete Bell joins Faction as SVP of Sales. Bell will lead all aspects of sales, including Faction’s revenue growth strategy and sales operations. He has more than 25 years of successful global sales leadership experience in North America, Europe, and Asia. Bell has built, recruited, managed, and grown sales operations in cloud, colocation, and network solutions.

Duan van der Westhuizen joins Faction as VP of Marketing. Van der Westhuizen will have ownership of all areas of marketing, including go-to-market strategy, brand, demand generation, and product marketing. He brings more than 15 years of cloud and managed services experience in the UK and US. Prior to joining Faction, van der Westhuizen was the General Manager for Microsoft Azure Managed Services at Rackspace.

To learn more about the Faction portfolio of multi-cloud services, please visit www.factioninc.com.

About Faction

Faction is a leading managed services provider for VMware Cloud on AWS, including disaster recovery and production deployments, and a provider of attached storage to VMware Cloud on AWS. Faction helps customers migrate to multi-cloud, powered by patented technology that provides low latency, high throughput connections to all the major clouds, including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Faction’s private and multi-cloud platforms give clients the ability to move, access, scale and protect data between clouds, without the fear of cloud lock-in. Faction is recognized as an Advanced AWS Consulting Partner and VMware Premier Cloud Provider. Follow Faction on Twitter (@FactionInc) and LinkedIn. For more information, please visit www.factioninc.com.

Media contact:

For Faction:

Jenny Good

[email protected]

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