SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SwiftStack, a technology innovator of private cloud storage for modern applications, today announced the expansion of the company’s advisory board and senior management team with the appointment of Dave Roberson as advisor, Dan Camarda as vice president of sales, Mario Blandini as vice president of marketing and Gary Butler as senior director of business development. The new executives will focus on supporting and increasing SwiftStack’s sales and marketing efforts to meet industry demand for the company’s private cloud storage solution.
“As more enterprises look to the cloud for their storage needs, private cloud object storage is emerging as an effective architecture to address the shift in storage requirements that are the result of the growth in unstructured data,” said Joe Arnold, CEO, SwiftStack. “The new additions to our team bring years of experience with storage technologies that will help us broaden our reach and sales efforts to take advantage of this growing market.”
Dave Roberson, advisor
Roberson joins SwiftStack as an advisor and brings years of experience to the company. He has been a private investor, business consultant and served on several boards since 2011. Roberson is a member of the board of directors of Quantum Corporation, where he serves as the chairman of the audit committee and a member of the leadership and compensation committee. He also serves on the board of directors of RagingWire Data Centers Corporation, TransLattice, Inc. and Aster Investment Management Company. Roberson most recently served as senior vice president in the enterprise server storage and networking division of Hewlett-Packard and was responsible for managing the storage business unit of the company. Prior to that, he was the CEO at Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a global storage systems and solution provider.
“SwiftStack is at the forefront of the private cloud storage industry, serving organizations dealing with large amounts of unstructured data and leading the OpenStack Object Storage project,” said Roberson. “I look forward to sharing my background and storage expertise to help the company grow in this important and emerging market.”
Dan Camarda, VP of sales
Camarda joins SwiftStack after 16 years of storage sales experience, as VP of sales to lead worldwide sales efforts and relationships with channel partners for the company. Previously, he was the VP of sales, worldwide at Avere Systems, developer of network-attached storage (NAS) optimization. He has served as VP of sales, western region for enterprise storage vendor Dell Compellent, with 300 percent sales growth over a three-year period positioning the company for its nearly $1 billion acquisition by Dell. Camarda has also held senior roles in sales and marketing at Pillar Data Systems (acquired by Oracle), Centor Software (acquired by MatrixOne) and Auspex Systems. He began his career in engineering and marketing roles at IBM.
Mario Blandini, VP of marketing
With 17 years of experience working in storage companies, Blandini joins SwiftStack to lead the company’s marketing strategy. Most recently, Blandini was the VP of marketing at Drobo, creator of external storage devices with 250,000 customers. Prior to that, he was the director of worldwide product marketing at storage networking leader Brocade. He has also led the deployment of large-scale SAN infrastructure and developed storage expertise in technical roles at Rhapsody Networks (acquired by Brocade), Sanrise (acquired by EMC), and Adaptec.
Gary Butler, senior director of business development
Butler will lead the business development efforts for SwiftStack and brings experience working with open source business models and Fortune 100 commercial companies. Before joining SwiftStack, Butler was senior manager of business development, cloud at Canonical where he launched the OpenStack business plan in 2012 in conjunction with the launch of the OpenStack Foundation and built the cloud partner ecosystem for the company. Prior to Canonical, he worked at Cray, where he led global partner strategies for small to medium vendors in hardware, networking and software. Butler has also held senior roles at Microsoft, as global business development manager, HPC ISV’s and Jobster.
About SwiftStack
SwiftStack is a technology innovator of private cloud storage for today’s applications. The SwiftStack software-defined storage (SDS) solution combines a unique, decoupled storage controller with the OpenStack Swift object storage system to provide customers with cost-effective, scale-out storage that can run on commodity hardware. The company was founded in 2011 to help operations teams implement and manage an easy-to-use, multi-tenant and highly scalable cloud storage platform. With SwiftStack, application developers and operations teams can benefit from SwiftStack integration and expertise to leverage the power of public cloud inside their own data center. SwiftStack is backed by top-tier venture capital firms including Mayfield Fund, Storm Ventures and UMC Capital. For more information, visit http://swiftstack.com/.
