AUSTIN, TX--(Marketwired - Jan 14, 2015) - SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI), a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT performance management software, today introduced Kong Yang as the newest member of its Head Geek team, specializing in virtualization management. Kong contributes more than 20 years of practical IT experience and a reputation as a trusted thought leader within the virtualization community. As a Head Geek, he will continue to share his passion for understanding the behavior of the entire application ecosystem with both the thwack® and the greater IT communities.

Meet Head Geek Kong Yang

  • IT expert with over 20 years of industry experience in performance tuning and troubleshooting enterprise stacks, virtualization sizing and capacity planning best practices, community engagement, and technology evangelism
  • VMware® vExpert from 2010-2014 and 2014-2015 Cisco Champion
  • 2014 Spiceworks® SpiceWorld Austin invited influencer and VMworld 2007 presenter on Microsoft Exchange performance on ESXi
  • Owner of United States Patent 8,176,497 for an intelligent method to auto-scale VMs to fulfill peak database workloads
  • Seattle Seahawks 12th Man, depressed Chicago Cubs fan, saltwater fisherman, World of Warcraft rogue, and fantasy football fanatic

"As IT continues to expand rapidly into virtualization and cloud infrastructures, it's important for us to subsequently continue to strengthen our expertise in these areas. Kong is the perfect person to help us do that," said Suaad Sait, executive vice president, products and markets, SolarWinds. "Kong brings a stellar reputation as an influencer in the space to our growing Head Geek team and will be a great asset to IT Pros who are tackling the everyday challenges of managing hybrid IT environments."

Kong joins the SolarWinds Head Geek team following a year as a Cloud Practice Leader at Gravitant, a hybrid cloud software startup, and 13 years in various roles at Dell.

What IS a Head Geek?
 SolarWinds Head Geeks bring over 120 collective years of real-world expertise and renowned industry credentials to provide the IT Pro community with perspectives, advice, and discussion on the latest trends and challenges in technology. SolarWinds Head Geeks engage with IT Pros on SolarWinds' thwack community forums and Geek Speak blog and provide advanced technical training in monthly SolarWinds Lab sessions. The Head Geeks also participate regularly on various IT forums including myITForum.com®, Windows-Noob.com, StackOverflow®, and Spiceworks.

Meet the Head Geeks

Patrick Hubbard boasts over 20 years' technical expertise and network management experience in areas including campus, datacenter, HA/DR networks, storage networks, VoIP/telepresence and VDI for Fortune 500 and startups. He contributes regularly to TechTarget's SearchNetworking and SearchSDN.

Lawrence Garvin has 23 years of IT experience, is a 10-time Microsoft MVP and a Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP), and has been working with Microsoft Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and Software Update Services (SUS) since the release of SUS SP1 in 2003, and update management, generally, since the availability of Windows Update in 1997. He contributes regularly to InformationWeek and Mission Critical.

Thomas LaRock has over 15 years of IT experience, holding various roles such as programmer, developer, analyst and database administrator and is a Microsoft Certified Master and six-time SQL Server® MVP. Thomas serves on the Board of Directors for the Professional Association for SQL Server, is an avid blogger, and authored DBA Survivor: Become a Rock Star DBA, a book designed to help junior to mid-level DBAs thrive in their careers.  

Leon Adato is a Cisco Certified Network Associate® (CCNA®), MCSE and SolarWinds Certified Professional® (he was once a customer, after all). His 25 years of network management experience span financial, healthcare, food and beverage, and other industries.

Don Thomas Jacob has worked in IT for 10 years in a variety of tech roles including tech support engineer, product blogger, product evangelist, and tech marketing lead. His experience and interests lie in network performance monitoring, security analytics, packet inspection solutions, flow-based technologies like NetFlow, sFlow® and IPFIX, and technologies such as QoS, NBAR, IPSLA, and Cisco Medianet and MediaTrace.

Praveen Manohar has eight years of IT experience including as a support engineer, product trainer and technical consultant, and specializes in technologies including NetFlow, Flexible NetFlow, Cisco NBAR, Cisco IPSLA, WMI and SNMP. Praveen gives strategic guidance for end users on applications, networks and performance monitoring tools. 

Connect with the Head Geeks 

  • Twitter®: @HeadGeeks 
  • thwack:
    • Kong: Kong.Yang
    • Patrick: Patrick.Hubbard 
    • Lawrence: LGarvin 
    • Thomas: SQLRockstar
    • Leon: Adatole
    • Don: DonThomas 
    • Praveen: PraveenManohar 

Additional Resources

  • Blog post: thwack a "V" on that Head Geek: Kong Yang

About SolarWinds
 SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) provides powerful and affordable IT management software to customers worldwide from Fortune 500® enterprises to small businesses. In all of our market areas, our approach is consistent. We focus exclusively on IT Pros and strive to eliminate the complexity that they have been forced to accept from traditional enterprise software vendors. SolarWinds delivers on this commitment with unexpected simplicity through products that are easy to find, buy, use and maintain while providing the power to address any IT management problem on any scale. Our solutions are rooted in our deep connection to our user base, which interacts in our thwack online community to solve problems, share technology and best practices, and directly participate in our product development process. Learn more today at http://www.solarwinds.com/.

SolarWinds, SolarWinds & Design and thwack are the exclusive property of SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC or its affiliates. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification purposes and may be or are intellectual property of their respective companies.

© 2015 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.

Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=2748962