Pliant Technology Names Richard Wilmer New Chief Executive Officer

MILPITAS, Calif., March 21, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Pliant Technology, developer of enterprise-class solid state storage devices designed to dramatically accelerate system and application performance while reducing IT costs, today announced the retirement of chief executive officer Amyl Ahola, who will remain on the company's Board of Directors. The company has named Richard Wilmer as the new chief executive officer.

As the company's first CEO, Ahola played a leadership role in successfully guiding the company strategy and fund raising efforts.  Under Ahola's direction and management, Pliant released its first family of high-performance, high-reliability single level cell (SLC) and multi-level cell (MLC) Lightning Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs). The company has grown tremendously as a leader in the enterprise solid state storage market with accelerating revenue growth for the last two years with focus on Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives.

Pliant Lightning EFDs are based on an advanced controller design and software architecture that delivers dramatic I/O performance and reliability improvements over existing solid state drive (SSD) technology under demanding enterprise workloads. The drives also offer exponentially higher performance and lower energy consumption than traditional high performance hard drives. In addition, Lightning EFDs fit into existing infrastructures without requiring changes to current storage management solutions.

With its innovative technology and ease of interoperability, Pliant has secured several OEM partnerships with storage industry leaders, including Dell, LSI and Teradata, and has helped solutions partners develop infrastructures and achieve performance levels not possible with traditional storage devices.  The company has also been recognized with several industry awards including the 2010 Gartner Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies, the 2009 Red Herring North America 100 Award and the 2009 Network Products Guide Hot Company Award.

Pliant is also dedicated to the expansion of the enterprise SSD storage market in a globally responsible manner.  To this end, Pliant is a member of the Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI),the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) Green Storage Initiative (GSI), and several leading standards organizations including JEDEC, SSD New Form Factor Organization and NVM Express.

"Amyl's leadership, experience and innovative vision have enabled Pliant to grow tremendously over the past four years," said Jim McCoy, chairman of the board, Pliant Technology.  "The company is now in an ideal position to address the rapidly growing demand for more efficient storage solutions across the globe."

Richard Wilmer brings more than 25 years of industry experience to Pliant, significant experience in managing fast growing businesses, and extensive knowledge of the needs and requirements of OEMs, channel solutions partners and enterprise IT organizations. Prior to Pliant, Wilmer served as COO and acting CFO for Santur Corporation, and previously as its vice president of global operations. Wilmer also served as vice president of business operations and vice president of engineering at Aruba Networks, and has held several executive management positions at Seagate, Maxtor, 2Wire, Procket Networks, and Terastor.

"Richard Wilmer's blue chip industry experience allows for a seamless transition of the CEO role," said McCoy, "His positive management style, technical acumen and strategic wherewithal provides him with the skills necessary to continue to drive Pliant's rapid growth."

About Pliant Technology

Pliant Technology's Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) are a new class of solid state storage devices that integrate seamlessly into enterprise information systems and dramatically improve performance, reliability, energy efficiency, and TCO.  Pliant's Lightning EFD family delivers breakthrough improvements over today's highest performing hard drive and SSD storage solutions for a range of data I/O intensive enterprise applications.  Pliant is based in Milpitas, Calif.  More information is available at www.plianttechnology.com, and on its blog, Enterprise Storage Sense.

Contact:
Sara Lee
Walt & Company
408-369-7200 ext. 2980
[email protected]

SOURCE Pliant Technology