Ed Walsh CEO of Storwize

Storwize, Inc. announced that former EMC and Avamar executive, Ed Walsh, has joined the company as Chief Executive Officer. Walsh takes the reins at the fast-growing company from Gal Naor who was appointed President of the company and will be focusing on the company’s strategic direction. Walsh will be responsible for heading a worldwide executive team responsible for all facets of the company’s global operations including corporate and product strategy, engineering, finance, sales and support.

Walsh brings 20+ years of experience to Storwize with demonstrated leadership capabilities in both startup and public companies. This includes a strong track record establishing emerging companies as market leaders, creating new market segments, driving effective channel go-to-market strategies and developing strong partner ecosystems with companies such as CA, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp, HDS, Cisco and Symantec. Ed was the CEO of Avamar and established Avamar as the first mover in data dedupe applied to the backup and recovery space.

"Ed has a proven history of energizing existing technology companies to become even more successful atop their respective industries and we look forward to adding his perspective to our leadership team as we prepare for our next stage of success," said Naor. "Ed is joining a great company at a great point in time and I am sure with his track record of success, we will continue to set the tone in the storage optimization space."

Naor founded Storwize in 2004 with Jonathan Amit, with a vision to radically change the economics of storage. With that vision Naor has assembled a strong executive team and overseen Storwize’s growth and emergence as the technology and market leader in online data reduction solutions with a rich patent portfolio and hundreds of customer deployments worldwide.

"Gal has done a tremendous job in leading the company from its inception to its current place atop the storage optimization space," said Walsh. "I look forward to working with him and continuing his leadership example by accepting the challenge of elevating the company to its next level of success," said Walsh. "The industry has seen great success with solutions that dedupe secondary and backup storage. The benefits and ROI for primary storage are even larger where there is zero tolerance for performance degradation. This is where Storwize has ‘cracked the code.’ With a proven solution in accounts worldwide and a tremendous return on investment proposition, the sky’s the limit."

Walsh served as CEO at Avamar Technologies, Inc., a venture-backed software firm acquired by EMC in late 2006. At Avamar, Walsh established the company as the leader in the first wave of the data de-duplication software market and led it to 700% revenue growth over 18 months. Since Avamar, Walsh has served as VP and GM of EMC‘s Information Management software group and as the CEO of Virtual Iron, a leader in the server virtualization space. Prior to Avamar, Walsh was senior vice president of sales, marketing and alliances for CNT, a publicly-traded storage networking company, leading to record growth and profitability. CNT was acquired by McData Corporation in 2005.