Nine cloud and Linux veterans have signed on to form the leadership team for CIQ, the company building the next generation of software infrastructure for enterprises running data-intensive workloads atop the Rocky Linux enterprise Linux distribution. This follows a successful funding round in May and a teaming with Google Cloud in July.

CIQ secured $26 million in Series A funding in May, led by Two Bear Capital, with the goal of building a suite of enterprise workflow orchestration and hybrid cloud solutions designed to support enterprises as compute-intensive workloads like high-performance computing (HPC) grow to include non-traditional workloads like high-end data analytics and AI/ML models, both on premises and in the cloud.

In July, Google Cloud announced that it had made its optimized version of Rocky Linux generally available to users of their cloud infrastructure service.

The senior leadership team at CIQ now includes: Robert Adolph, co-founder and chief product officer—Adolph, Rob Dufalo, SVP engineering—Dufalo, John Frey, CTO—Frey, Gregory M. Kurtzer, co-founder and CEO—Kurtzer, David LaDuke, VP marketing—LaDuke, Stephen Moody, SVP support and technology—Moody, Marlin Prager, CFO—Prager, Brock Taylor, VP HPC and strategic partners—Taylor, and Art Tyde, VP business development—Tyde.

The CIQ suite of tools is designed to leverage the capabilities of Rocky Linux, which is the successor to CentOS.