Neil Cresswell

Neil is the CEO and Co-Founder of Portainer.io, based in Auckland New Zealand.

Neil is a career consultant, having spent 25 years in the roles of systems engineering, IT consulting, and more recently IT management. Neil started his career with 12 years at IBM as his foundation, where he had a leading role in Server, Storage, and Virtualisation systems engineering.

Neil moved from IBM into self-employment with two business partners, who together created one of NZ’s (and later ASEANs) leading VMware consulting practices, ViFX. During this time, Neil was based in Singapore, and was responsible for the design and deployment of the largest and most complex VMware deployments in Asia Pacific. This experience saw Neil consulting to CIOs, CISO’s and CTO’s all over the region, picking up a vast array of intelligence on what these senior IT leaders expect from a product before it can obtain widespread adoption in their organisations.

Neil then moved into a CEO role at a start-up Cloud Service Provider, whereby he grew that business from nothing to $8M ARR in just 2 years.

Neil’s exposure to Docker technologies came 4 years ago, when at the helm of the Cloud Service Provider, he wanted to bring a “Containers as a Service” offering to market (well before many of the hyper-scales had such offerings). Neil attempted to find self-service portals that could be deployed by the service provider as a way to help his customers consume the service, but there were none available, so Neil had Portainer built.

Portainer has now grown into an entity of its own right, and using Neil’s knowledge of the CIO’s requirements, knowledge of the technology, and knowledge of infrastructure management, Neil has crafted Portainer into a strong contender in the Container management space.

Neil now runs the Portainer.io business, and is responsible for the overall product strategy and the team entrusted to deliver on that strategy.

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