X-IO Technologies has appointed business growth specialist Brian Owen as
President and Chief Executive Officer. Owen brings an extensive track
record in growing the value of many companies through building
distribution and value added reseller networks, as well as through
strategic partnerships and alliances.
Other key executive changes:
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John Beletic, the former CEO, will now become chairman of X-IO.
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David Gustavsson has been appointed as Chief Operating Officer.
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Gavin McLaughlin has been appointed Vice President of Worldwide
Marketing.
“Brian is an outstanding talent to lead X-IO,” said John Beletic,
Chairman of the Board and Oak Venture Partner.
Owen has held several highly successful CEO positions. As CEO of MapInfo
(NASDAQ: MM) he oversaw an IPO that was 24 times oversubscribed, while
his planned IPO at decalog NV triggered a sale to SunGuard (NYSE: SDS).
He has also held senior executive positions within Computer Associates
and Oracle.
Most recently, Owen was a general partner with Masthead Venture Partners
where he oversaw early-stage investments in emerging technology-based
companies, many of which became category-defining leaders in high-growth
markets.
Owen cites the opportunity of the company’s ISE (Intelligent Storage
Element) systems’ ability to act as the hardware foundations of
software-defined storage (SDS) as the key to transforming X-IO’s
fortunes. He said: “The realization of the software-defined data center
is dramatically transforming the way companies buy, deploy and manage
storage and the ISE is the only storage technology that reduces cost and
complexity whilst also providing consistent performance and reliability.
We plan to drive X-IO out of its previously purely technology focused
comfort-zone and go head-to-head at a solution-orientated level with
both the new wave of all-flash / hybrid storage start-ups and the
traditional legacy storage brands such as NetApp and EMC.”
According to Owen, SDS provides greater efficiencies for data management
through exploiting server hypervisor feature sets and less need for
expensive, feature-bloated storage arrays. He believes that customers
adopting SDS “now want storage that they can ‘rack and stack’ in a more
efficient way that allows their infrastructure teams to dictate how it
best wants to use and manage its storage.”
“The fact is, the more virtualized the data center is, the more relevant
we become,” he added.
New COO
Owen is making significant changes to the company’s focus and
organizational structure. The first key change is the appointment of
David Gustavsson to Chief Operating Officer. David brings a great deal
of organizational experience and can harness this to align previously
separate areas of X-IO.
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In this role he will oversee engineering, technical marketing,
manufacturing and support.
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Formerly Vice President of Engineering at X-IO, Gustavsson has been
tasked with leading the company’s new engineering strategy that will
underpin the growing virtualization and SDS opportunity.
Owen said: “David is an energetic, passionate fireball whose technical
vision will be central to our future product strategy. Having David in
this role, and building a strong team around him will be central to our
success.”
Worldwide Marketing
In addition to the new COO, Owen has also appointed Gavin McLaughlin as
Vice President of Worldwide Marketing. Previously X-IO’s Solutions
Development Director, Gavin brings 27 years of technical, sales and
marketing experience of the storage industry at organizations such as
EMC, HP and Sun Microsystems.
McLaughlin will be leading all outbound communications at X-IO including
press and analyst relations, core communications, channel and field
marketing, together with strategic alliances.
Owen said: “Gavin has spent a lot of time over the last few months
creating, testing and communicating the core X-IO message with a small
group of key influencers. Now bringing him onto the executive staff
team, he will provider an enhanced focus on communicating these new
messages to IT decision makers, channels, and influencers”.
About X-IO
X-IO Technologies, with its Intelligent Storage Element (ISE)
architecture, has solved some of the fundamental challenges of
enterprise storage. ISE addresses the demand of customers for long duty
cycle storage, achieves 100 percent capacity utilization without loss of
performance, and uniquely does not require service intervention during
its lifetime.
Based in Colorado, the organization has offices throughout North
America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa and has a proven
installation of more than 7,000 units across 1,200+ customers worldwide.
Copyright Business Wire 2014