Darwin McDaniel
Ray Kalustyan, a former group vice president and general manager at Oracle, has joined Rackspace as VP and GM of the cloud computing firm's government solutions business.
Rackspace said Wednesday Kalustyan will oversee growth efforts for the unit that was integrated after the Texas-based company acquired managed cloud services provider Datapipe in 2017.
He previously led Oracle’s cloud and on-premise professional services division, which serves both the public and private sectors.
His 39-year career also included eight years at Fiserv, where he established a public sector financial services business that provides root-cause analysis, business process professional services and outsourced data-processing services.
Kalustyan held leadership roles at EDS, Getronics, Unisys and Amdahl. He started his corporate career as a marketing representative at IBM.
In an interview posted on the Rackspace blog page, he said the federal government looks to industry to help agencies adopt technology platforms "in the cases where they simply don’t have the capability."
"For example, new payment technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cybersecurity — the government is looking to commercial industry to do the research and development, to create the proof of concept, pilot and ultimately deploy that tech," Kalustyan added.
