Fugue names webMethods cofounder Phillip Merrick as CEO

Phillip Merrick founded Reston, Va.–based webMethods, and led it to a soaring IPO in 2000. Later, he took the reins as CEO of email delivery company SparkPost, helping the Columbia, Md.–based company see revenue gains and gain tech giants as customers that are setting it up for a next phase of growth.

Now he’s stepping into the CEO of Frederick, Md.–based Fugue, which is based in Frederick, Md, and has the largest concentration of its roughly 70 employees in its DuPont Circle offices in D.C.

Merrick recently stepped down from SparkPost, where former AddThis CEO Rich Harris took the helm at the beginning of the month.

In Fugue, he sees a company with traction. Founded in 2013, Fugue has raised $75 million – most recently a $41 M round led by NEA to open 2017 – and released its flagship product last year.

“Fugue has certainly been around for a few years but I think it is really at an interesting inflection point,” Merrick said. “Much of the company’s history to date has been focused on build great tech for the cloud.”

Fugue’s platform allows companies shifting resources like apps and databases to the cloud to set policies around how those resources should be managed for compliance or security reasons. The platform also fixes the potential issues.

“The customer gets the problem found, identified and fixed in a window as short as 60 seconds,” Merrick said.

The company’s product was released late last year, and Merrick said the company has an initial revenue and customer base.

“What we plan to do is use that as a foundation and springboard into segments like financial services, internet services and some parts of the government space,” Merrick said.

For Merrick, working on a company at the stage where Fugue now sits is a “passion.” He also sees the technology as particularly promising.

“This is a major sort of once in a generation revolution where IT is moving out of private data centers into the cloud. That is a huge shift that is fundamentally changing how we think about computing, and having the opportunity to think about that revolution and provide technology and product that helps make that happen – that is what ultimately appealed to me about joining Fugue at this time.”

With Merrick coming onboard, Fugue cofounder Josh Stella will become the company’s CTO. He’ll return to focusing “100 percent of my time” on the product.

“There aren’t too many people qualified to run a rapidly growing software company with first-class financial backing and market-creating technology, but Phillip fits the bill,” Stella said in a statement. “We spent the last year building an incredible team, and I’m confident that Phillip will help us grow into the company we’re capable of being.”