Creator Frank Karlitschek leads community and enterprise development efforts for file synch and share company
Boston, MA – March 6, 2012 – ownCloud Inc., the commercial entity behind the popular open source enterprise file sync and share project, announced today that co-founder, community manager and creator Frank Karlitschek has been named chief technology officer, responsible for all community and product development efforts.
ownCloud — with more than 400,000 users — offers the ease-of-use and cost effectiveness of Dropbox and box.net with a more secure, better managed offering that, because it’s open source, offers greater flexibility and no vendor lock in. ownCloud users can run their own file sync and share services on their own hardware and storage, use popular public hosting and storage offerings, or both.
Karlitschek, who created the project two years ago, is responsible for all community interaction and all development work on both the community and the enterprise applications.
“Frank is ownCloud in many respects,” said Markus Rex, founder and CEO, ownCloud. “He not only built ownCloud from scratch, he built a tremendous community following as well. This new role acknowledges the work he’s done channeling the wishes of the community into true enterprise offerings.”
Karlitschek is a long-time open source contributor and former board member of the KDE e.V. He has managed engineering teams for more than 10 years and worked as head of unit and managing director at different internet companies. Since 2007 he led a startup developing social networking and e-commerce products for several fortune 500 companies. In 2010 he started the ownCloud project and has lead the community project since then.
“It has been fabulous to watch my child grow from a wish by friends and colleagues to provide a safer, more flexible alternative to DropBox and its copycats into a full-fledged business tool,” said Karlitschek. “The new responsibilities allow me fully expand the project’s capabilities.”
Karlitschek studied computer science at the University of Tübingen.
OwnCloud Inc. will launch products and service offerings beginning this quarter.
About ownCloud Inc.
Based on the popular ownCloud open source community project, ownCloud Inc. was founded in 2011 to bring greater flexibility, access and security to unstructured data in enterprises. Company headquarters are in Boston, with European headquarters are in Nuremberg, Germany. For more information, visit: https://owncloud.com.
