David Hatfield President, Pure Storage

Pure Storage, Inc. announced two appointments to its executive management team. David Hatfield has joined as president, and Christopher Zang as its VP of support.

Both are experienced executives with deep domain expertise in enterprise information technologies and markets. The news comes on the heels of a string of recent successes for Pure Storage, including the closing of a $40 million Series D funding round and the delivery of several advancements to its FlashArray.

In their new roles, Hatfield and Zang will support the company as it executes a go-to-market strategy, which includes expansion into international markets in 2013.  

 With 23 years of experience building high performance global sales, marketing and product delivery teams, Hatfield has held leadership roles at Akamai Technologies, Veritas Software, Symantec, Limelight Networks and others. Prior to Pure Storage, he served as president of SaaS and EVP of global sales, marketing and services at Limelight Networks. He joined Limelight Networks when it was a small, privately-held company and helped build the customer operations and global channel to deliver its distributed caching, cloud storage and application acceleration solutions to Global 2000 enterprises and governments. He led the company to over 800% growth during his tenure, propelling the company into its IPO. Similarly, Hatfield joined Akamai Technologies before its IPO. While there, he was promoted to lead North American Sales and played a key role in scaling the organization from four customers and $400,000 to nearly 1,400 customers and $160 million in revenue in less than three years. Hatfield developed his storage industry expertise at Veritas and later Symantec, following one of the largest enterprise software mergers in history. At Veritas, he led the #1 sales organization into record year over year revenue growth. He was then promoted to group VP of sales at Symantec, following the acquisition, where he led an extended organization of nearly 1,000 employees, growing revenues from $600 million to $750 million.

"Pure Storage’s engineering and product teams have built the most innovative enterprise storage product in decades, and with incredible early adoption across the mid market, large enterprises and state and local government, now is the right time to rapidly scale our business to meet the needs of the marketplace," said Hatfield. "I’m honored to be joining a talented team that is committed to delivering the best customer and partner experience in the industry. Together with our growing global channel ecosystem, we will continue to lead the shift of production storage from disk to all-flash, and maximize the value of the FlashArray for our customers and shareholders."  

 Zang brings over a decade of leadership experience in support and service operations for private and public enterprise technologies to the Pure Storage leadership team. He joins the company from Imperva, where he served as VP of product support and customer advocacy, and was responsible for building the company’s global support organization. The company was later named one of 2011’s top performing IPOs by Investor’s Business Daily. He has also held various executive roles at Iron Mountain, Mimosa Systems (acquired by Iron Mountain), AXS-One, and IXOS Software (now OpenText). At IXOS Software, he helped build the company’s multi-national support and services organization from the ground up. As VP of support at Pure Storage, he will spearhead development of the company’s global customer and partner support organization.

"Pure Storage is committed to providing the highest levels of support, so enterprise customers can maximize uptime and reduce internal IT costs," said Zang. "I’m excited to be building a world-class global support organization that our customers and partners can truly rely on, and that will help to accelerate adoption of the Pure Storage FlashArray."

"We are striving to set a new industry benchmark for customer and partner satisfaction, as well as for growth," said Scott Dietzen, CEO at Pure Storage. "We are thrilled to welcome Dave and Christopher to the Pure Storage team. Both have the expertise that will help us to deliver the ideal mix of operational best practices and innovation that are essential as we continue in our mission to build the next great storage company."