Aligned Beefs up Management Team with Hires from Rival Firms

ViaWest, Digital Realty, CBRE, and AT&T are some of the companies that recently lost team members to Aligned Data Centers, a recent entrant into the US data center services market that’s launched a data center in the Dallas market while building another one in Phoenix.

Since about one year ago, the company has been beefing up its senior management team, attracting eight new members from rivals as well as companies it does not compete with directly, the company said in a news release issued Monday.

According to their LinkedIn profiles three of the hires came on board in May of last year: Brandon Keesee, former director of engineering at CBRE, who joined Aligned as data center director; Jack Edwards, who joined as director of data center services after about three years at AT&T; and Ted Martin, who joined as facilities director after a year at QTS.

The others joined more recently. Jeff Johnson and Tim Chandler, formerly with ViaWest, joined this year as VP of channel sales and VP of sales engineering, respectively. Suzanne Williams left a sales manager position at Digital Realty to join Aligned as VP of business development; John Greenwood, former executive VP of sales and marketing at Vazata, took a similar role at Aligned in December.

Another new hire, who joined in March, is Clay Ashworth, former sales operations director at Wave Broadband.

Aligned Data Centers is part of a holding company called Aligned Energy. Backed by the hedge fund BlueMountain Capital Management, it includes two other affiliates: Energy Metrics, which sells data center infrastructure management software, and Karbon Engineering, a data center consulting, design, and commissioning services organization.