Fusion-io announced that network storage industry veteran Jim Dawson has joined the company as senior vice-president of worldwide sales. Dawson joins Fusion-io’s executive team to aggressively drive the company’s worldwide sales expansion in application-centric enterprise storage.

  Dawson brings more than 20 years of senior direct and indirect sales experience in the storage industry, including his last five years at 3PAR, the industry’s leading utility storage provider. There, he helped lead the company from its early stages to initial public offering and oversaw the build out of the company’s worldwide sales organization, which includes a direct sales force in the U.S., U.K. and Germany; and indirect channel resellers in the balance of EMEA and Asia Pacific. Among his accomplishments at 3PAR, Dawson established and executed a sales strategy that provided 80 percent compounded annual revenue growth over his five-year tenure.

“With the seemingly insatiable demand for storage performance driven by many applications, databases and data center virtualization projects, it is nearly impossible for traditional, disk-based storage infrastructure to continue to scale in performance,” Dawson said. “Simply putting solid-state disks within the array’s architecture doesn’t solve this problem. But Fusion-io’s innovative approach to system acceleration does by placing the solid-state technology in the server where the applications reside while increasing performance by several orders of magnitude.”

Dawson's background includes a 13-year tenure at Data General, where he was a part of the start-up group that became the CLARiiON business unit. When Data General was acquired by EMC in 1999, Jim was then vice president of international with responsibility for the storage business outside of the U.S.

Dawson has also worked at a series of start-ups, leading the worldwide sales teams at Scale Eight, Neoscale and most recently 3PAR.

“It is fair to say that Jim is one of the world’s top sales professionals in the data storage industry today,” said David Bradford, CEO of Fusion-io. “As our company leads the revolution to a world of application-centric enterprise storage, Jim's expertise and deep understanding of this industry will help Fusion-io accelerate the transformation of the world's data centers.”

During his career in the storage industry, Dawson has lived and worked in the U.S., Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong and London.