Astute Networks Expands Executive Team With Appointment Of Key Hires From VMware & SEPATON
Steven Houck and Jay Kramer Join Company to Build Leadership in Virtualization, Cloud and Data Center Infrastructure Market
Astute Networks, a leading provider of patented network and storage-based technologies, recently announced the appointment of two executives to its team: Steven Houck, senior vice president of worldwide sales and Jay Kramer, vice president of worldwide marketing. The addition of Houck and Kramer rounds out Astute Networks' management team and brings key expertise to the company as it expands its leadership in the data center infrastructure, cloud and virtualization markets. Both executives will report directly to CEO Steve Topper.
"With the addition of Steve and Jay, Astute has the strategic team in place to grow the company into a world-class, market-leading organization," said Steve Topper, CEO of Astute Networks. "In the past few years, we have invested heavily in R&D to define and develop innovative solutions that solve real customer problems. We've built a channel friendly go-to-market strategy that reflects our deep understanding of the complexities customers face when implementing a virtualization strategy. By augmenting our strong technical teams with Steve and Jay's real-world domain expertise and successes in global sales, strategic partnership, channel development and technology marketing, Astute is well positioned to scale its business to market leadership."
As Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Houck will be responsible for developing Astute Networks' global sales strategy and growing company revenue. Houck is a technology veteran with 20 years experience scaling global sales channels and partner programs for both private and public companies in North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America. Prior to joining Astute Networks, Houck held various executive positions at VMware including vice president of worldwide channels and vice president/general manager, Latin America. Houck also served as vice president worldwide SMB sales at EMC where he was chartered with and successfully developed the SMB storage market for EMC Corporation. Houck held the position of CEO at Gridtree, a cloud services company serving enterprises throughout Latin America. He has also held various sales leadership positions including executive vice president of worldwide sales at Corel Corporation.
Kramer brings 25 years experience in the technology industry to his role as vice president of worldwide marketing at Astute, where he will spearhead the company's efforts to build a leadership position in the fast-growing global market for virtualization solutions addressing mid-market and enterprise infrastructure and cloud deployments. Prior to joining Astute Networks, Kramer was the vice president of worldwide marketing at SEPATON; a vice president of worldwide marketing at iStor; and a vice president of marketing at Maxtor and CDS. Kramer had also held executive positions in sales, marketing and strategic planning at Unisys Corporation. He has served on the Board of Directors and in chairperson positions for both the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) and the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA). He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Flash Memory Summit.
Houck and Kramer are joining Astute Networks' experienced management team, which includes Keith Klarer, vice president of hardware engineering; Simon Knee, vice president of software engineering and Robert Harling, vice president of operations. For more details Astute Networks' executive management team, please visit: http://www.astutenetworks.com/pages/about/ab_management.html
About Astute Networks
Astute Networks, Inc. is the innovator of performance centric
network-based virtualization appliances. Built upon our patented programmable I/O processor technology, Astute Networks' cost-effective and easy to deploy solutions are purposely optimized to seamlessly integrate with existing customer infrastructure and eliminate the I/O demands of the virtualized environments with price/performance, ease of use, management, and "green" energy efficiencies unmatched in the industry. For more information, visit www.astutenetworks.com.
SOURCE: Astute Networks, Inc.