Phillip Merrick has joined Fugue, a provider of automated cloud infrastructure management solutions, as its CEO. In his new role, 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.

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.