Acopia Networks(R), the leader in high-performance
enterprise file virtualization, announced today the appointment of
Kirby Wadsworth as senior vice president of marketing and business
development. A skilled professional with extensive storage industry
experience in both emerging and established companies, Wadsworth will
lead the company's global marketing and business development functions
reporting directly to Acopia's president and chief executive officer,
Christopher Lynch.
"Kirby's incredible depth of experience and knowledge will be
instrumental in helping to shape Acopia's marketing and business
development efforts into a world-class organization tasked with both
furthering the recognition and trust in the Acopia brand, as well as
growing an expanded channel partner network characterized by deeper
and stronger relationships," said Lynch. "We are delighted to be able
to attract someone of Kirby's caliber to the executive management team
during what I believe is to be one of the most strategic periods in
the company's evolution and growth."
"The opportunity to lead Acopia's worldwide marketing and business
development effort was irresistible," said Wadsworth. "In the recent
TheInfoPro's (TIP) Heat Index survey, file virtualization jumped from
the 15th to 6th position, indicating that adoption will double this
year alone. Acopia already leads this market with an enviable slate of
enthusiastic, brand-name customers. I am thrilled to join what I
believe is the most stellar team in the industry today, as we build
Acopia into the most recognized and trusted brand in the marketplace."
Said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst with the
Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), "The infrastructure virtualization
market is exploding and file-based solutions are getting hotter every
day. Acopia is moving on to the next phase - having acquired huge
customers and momentum - they need to start telling the world what
they have to offer. Kirby has been at the forefront of many storage
industry transformations, and it looks like he might just be doing it
again at Acopia."
"Today's broadly distributed computing environments - exemplified
by SOA and Web 2.0 architectures - require careful consideration of
the ways distributed data is used, stored and managed. File
virtualization shows potential as a means to enable enhanced
management and control in vastly distributed architectures," said
recognized industry visionary, Jon William Toigo, managing principal
of Toigo Partners International and founder of the Data Management
Institute. "Rather than recentralizing file-based data, which violates
the 80/20 rule of networks, some sort of file virtualization
technology is needed to enable data to be placed where it is accessed
and used, while enabling management discipline. Kirby and I have
worked together in many of his previous lives and he impresses me as a
marketing expert who is also a competent technologist: a rare
combination. I'm delighted to see him working with Chris Lynch to
transform the world of file management at Acopia. Together, they could
well forge the current 'marketectures' surrounding file virtualization
into the real architectures that business urgently needs."
Mr. Wadsworth joins Acopia from Revivio where, as senior vice
president of marketing and business development, he was pivotal in
creating the continuous data protection (CDP) market. Prior to
Revivio, Mr. Wadsworth co-founded and served as vice president of
marketing and business development at Storability, a pioneer in
managed storage services, which was subsequently acquired by
StorageTek. Prior to Storability, Wadsworth served as vice president
and general manager of Compaq's Network Storage Services Business
Unit, where he created the Enterprise Storage Network Architecture
(ENSA) and led the early market introduction of multi-vendor storage
networking.
Mr. Wadsworth serves as an adjunct professor of marketing at
Babson College's F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business and the Sawyer
School of Business at Suffolk University. He is a frequent speaker at
industry conferences and events, and a contributing author to numerous
publications.
About Acopia Networks
Acopia Networks is the leader in high-performance, enterprise file
virtualization. Its family of Adaptive Resource Switches (ARX) help
customers manage the growth, complexity and cost of unstructured,
globally distributed, file-based information. By providing automatic,
policy-driven, data migration, tiering, load balancing, and
replication across multi-vendor storage environments, the ARX switches
help IT executives to reduce management overhead and accelerate
business workflow. For further information about Acopia's products and
services, please visit its Website at www.acopia.com, call
978-513-2900 (US) / 49-89-944-90-165 (Europe) or email
info@acopia.com.
(C)2006 Acopia Networks, Inc. Acopia is a trademark of Acopia
Networks. All other brands, products, or service names may be
trademarks or service marks of the companies with which they are
associated.
