Cloud infrastructure and hosted services biz Rise has plonked its IT services director James Henigan into the managing director's hot seat.

The previous top boss Alex Hilton left in September and Sue MacDermott, head of channel at Rise, kept the chair warm in the interim.

Andy Burton, CEO at Fasthosts Internet Group which owns Rise, confirmed the promotion of Henigan, a former infrastructure architect evangelist at Microsoft.

"We consulted him [when he was at Microsoft] on how to set up a cloud platform and then hired him. He's looked after our products and IT services for nearly three years and most of that is relevant to IaaS so it was sensible we made him the public face of Rise," said Burton.

MacDermott has reverted to normal day duties as head of channels at Rise, which sells infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and hosting services directly via an army of partners.

Fasthosts bumped up its revenues by 7.6 per cent, year on year, to £36.2m in calendar 2011 - according to the latest results filed to Companies House - but profits slipped 5.8 per cent to £7.7m as the group ploughed cash into customer marketing. ®