Panzura Names Industry Veteran Mark Santora to Board of Directors

SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Panzura, the emerging leader in converged cloud storage and application optimization products, today announced that Mark Santora, former Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for NetApp, has joined the Panzura Board of Directors. In this role, Mark will be working closely with the Panzura management team to build a sales organization without rival, recruit Tier 1 channel partners, and provide valuable go-to-market guidance.

Mark has a proven track record of aggressively growing revenue streams and brand awareness with more than 30 years experience in the IT industry. He most recently served on the board of directors of Topio, an enterprise software replication company acquired by NetApp in 2006. Prior to Topio, Mark held several senior executive sales and marketing positions at NetApp playing an integral role in growing the company from its initial customer shipments to over one billion dollars in annual revenue.

"Panzura has an exciting mix of innovation, vision and engineering experience to capitalize on the emerging trend of utilizing the cloud for mission-critical IT services," Mr. Santora said. "And, unlike many startup companies in this space, Panzura already has product deployed in a number of Fortune 500 enterprises, with those customers expressing a high level of satisfaction. I look forward to providing guidance to turn these early successes into sustained market leadership moving forward."

In addition to his impressive accomplishments at NetApp, Mark has a proven record of success in growing inventive startup companies. Prior to NetApp, Mark was a Director at Crescendo Communications, advancing the company from its first customer shipments to over $30 million in sales, culminating in the acquisition of the company by Cisco Systems, the first ever for the networking giant, in 1993. Mark was also a director at MIPS Computer Systems (IPO in 1989) and held various sales positions at Sun Microsystems (IPO in 1986) and Data General Corporation.

"We are very fortunate to have an executive of Mark's caliber join our team," said Randy Chou, Co-Founder and CEO of Panzura.  "Mark's experience and guidance will prove to be instrumental in the continued market leadership of Panzura. In addition, having such a seasoned executive join our team validates the unrivaled quality of the people and products of Panzura."

Panzura delivers innovative products that take a unique approach to traditional storage, termed Application Network Storage (ANS).  By combining application logic with storage technology, Panzura is able to provide solutions that are faster, cheaper and more secure than traditional approaches to Tier 1 Storage.

Email [email protected] or visit http://www.panzura.com for more information.

About Panzura

Panzura is the emerging leader in converged cloud storage and application optimization products. Founded in 2008 and backed by leading venture firms, Panzura delivers innovative products that take an application-centric rather than network-centric approach to storage, termed Application Network Storage (ANS). By combining application logic with storage technology, Panzura is able to provide solutions that are faster, cheaper and more secure than traditional approaches to Tier 1 Storage. This revolutionary architecture allows enterprises to save costs, significantly increase performance and secure mission-critical data via public or private cloud environments.

To learn more, visit http://www.panzura.com or email [email protected].

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SOURCE Panzura