Zorian Rotenberg CEO of StarWind Software

StarWind Software Inc., provider of storage software, announced the appointment of Zorian Rotenberg as Chief Executive Officer and announced the opening of the U.S. headquarters. Mr. Rotenberg brings extensive experience in operations, strategic alliances, and mergers and acquisitions, and has a strong background in high-tech as well as financial markets.

The opening of StarWind Software’s U.S. headquarters near Boston, Massachusetts, comes shortly after the announcement of their spin-off from Rocket Division Inc. and the investment, led by ABRT Venture Fund, meant to accelerate sales and assist in marketing efforts.

Mr. Rotenberg commented: "I am very excited to join StarWind and look forward to building and growing the business globally. This is a great company with excellent technology and a very talented, accomplished team. We have an extraordinary opportunity to develop new solutions for our customers and be a leader in the rapidly growing storage virtualization market."

According to IDC, the storage market experienced strong growth in 3Q’08, with iSCSI SAN being one of the fastest growing segments: "The iSCSI SAN market continues to show strong momentum, posting 96.7% revenue growth compared to the prior year’s quarter."

StarWind is dedicated to small and midsize company storage solutions and is expanding their operations, marketing and product offerings. Their flagship product, StarWind Server is an iSCSI Target software that installs on any industry-standard Windows Server and converts it into a reliable, powerful and affordable IP SAN.

“We’re very excited to have Zorian Rotenberg leading StarWind to its next era of growth. Zorian is the exact combination of a technology executive and a savvy business leader that the Board was hoping to find in a CEO. He is the ideal person to help take StarWind forward,” said Anton Kolomeitsev, founder of StarWind Software.

Zorian Rotenberg will be focused on continuing to build on StarWind’s success in the storage software market and will be responsible for global operations including sales, marketing, strategic alliances, and customer programs.

Before joining StarWind, Mr. Rotenberg most recently served as the Vice President of corporate and business development at Acronis Inc., a provider of storage management and disaster recovery software, where he launched the business development group and led global strategic alliances with companies such as EMC, HP, Intel, IBM, Microsoft and VMware. He worked directly for the CEO of Acronis when the company grew rapidly over a period of a few years from about $20 million to over $100 million worldwide. Previously, Mr. Rotenberg worked at Merrill Lynch & Co. in the Investment Banking Division focusing on mergers & acquisitions and financing transactions, at NeoCarta Ventures focusing on investing in technology companies and at IBM in the Software Sales Division.

Mr. Rotenberg graduated from Lehigh University with a degree in Finance and with minors in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. He earned his MBA from Harvard Business School.