Plexxi Names New CEO to Lead Company into New IT Era

NASHUA, N.H., Nov. 10, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Plexxi, a pioneer of next-generation networking products, today named former top EMC executive and serial entrepreneur Richard Napolitano as CEO to continue the company's expansion and help drive the networking industry's transition to an application- and data-focused era powered by the explosive growth in mobile, social media, cloud and Big Data.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20141107/157431LOGO

The IT industry is on the verge of a historic shift. After the mainframe and minicomputer era of the 1970s and '80s, the new demands of the Internet spurred the creation of an IT infrastructure based on the components of compute, storage and networking. Today, the next major IT transition is taking place as the growth in mobile, social media, Big Data and cloud demands a more agile network to access and use this enormous amount of distributed data.

"We stand today at a transition point in the IT landscape," said Napolitano. "This transformation will upend the networking industry as we know it and affect how businesses operate for decades to come. Plexxi has helped define 'What's next' in networking so I'm excited to join the company as Plexxi leads the way into this new IT era and defines the next generation of networking architecture."

"The rise of mobile, Big Data, social media and the Internet of Things are putting new and unprecedented demands on our IT infrastructure," said Richard Fichera, vice president and principal analyst of infrastructure and operations at Forrester Research. "We're at the dawn of a new IT era where the application and data are king. These demands require new infrastructure architectural principles because of the limitations of traditional architectures."

As an independent board member with the company, Napolitano and Plexxi founder David Husak worked in tandem to chart the company's future while preparing to bring Napolitano on board as CEO to scale its growth. Napolitano will continue to work closely with Husak who will serve as executive vice president of strategy and engineering, focusing on the development of Plexxi's industry-leading networking technology and products.

"When I founded Plexxi, I fully anticipated the transition from building the technology to taking it broadly to market," said Husak. "For any company to break through in a highly competitive market, there must be a strong partnership between the technology vision and commercial leadership. I couldn't be more thrilled to have someone of Rich's talent and expertise beside me to lead Plexxi through this transformational market opportunity."

Napolitano has a long track record of scaling businesses to record growth while disrupting established industries. He has held many top leadership roles in the technology industry, including president of the Unified Storage Division at EMC Corporation, the world's largest data storage provider, and president and general manager of U.S. sales for Sun Microsystems, which was acquired by Oracle. He also served as chairman, CEO and president of Pirus Networks, which was acquired by Sun, and cofounder and CEO of Data Kinesis, which was acquired by Adaptec.

Plexxi also appointed Tim Lieto as senior vice president of sales and customer service to lead the company's worldwide sales and channel effort and expand its ecosystem of distribution partners and systems integrators. Lieto, who has held similar positions at Sun Microsystems, 3Com and Lucent, has helped develop small companies into large corporations throughout his career by building direct, channel and OEM sales growth.

As a key component of its strategy to accelerate growth and address the changing IT landscape, Plexxi is focused on three market solutions: agile IT datacenters, scale-out application infrastructure and distributed cloud environments. Plexxi's agile IT datacenter solutions create an automated, intelligently managed datacenter network leveraging a flat, scale-out architecture ideal for enterprise applications and their growth. Plexxi's scale-out application solutions deliver a purpose-built network for horizontally scaled, distributed applications like Big Data, clustered compute and clustered storage. Plexxi's distributed cloud solutions create a high-capacity network for distributing resources across multiple sites regardless of distance.

Supporting quotes:

"Increasing enterprise demand for big data solutions requires network designers to reassess existing network infrastructures to ensure optimized performance." – Gartner: "Is Your Network Ready for Big Data? Oct. 31, 2013."

"The future of IT revolves around data. Visionary companies like Plexxi help evolve the network to be more data-oriented and capable of handling the distributed applications that leverage an enterprise data hub." – Tim Stevens, Vice President, Business and Corporate Development, Cloudera.

"It is in our nature to seek disruptive and innovative solutions here at the Lab. Plexxi's architecture allows me to explore the benefits of SDN across a wide range of different applications."– Michail Bletsas, Director of Computing, MIT Media Lab.

About Plexxi, Inc.
Plexxi is a pioneer of next-generation networking products and solutions for scale-out datacenter and cloud environments. Plexxi's products – Plexxi Control and the Plexxi Switch – and market solutions create an optimized network that dynamically helps applications perform better.  Headquartered in Nashua, N.H., and with an office in San Francisco, Plexxi has raised $48+ million in venture financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Northbridge Venture Partners. For more information, visit www.plexxi.com or follow us on Twitter @PlexxiInc. 

Media contact:
Jackie D'Andrea 
(781) 966-4143
[email protected]

SOURCE Plexxi

Related Links

http://www.plexxi.com