Jay Kidd Board’s Director of ProStor

ProStor Systems announced the appointment of Jay Kidd to its Board of Directors.

 Mr. Kidd’s accomplishments span over 30 years in key leadership roles at many high profile multi-national storage, networking, and computing companies with a strong emphasis in product strategy and development, marketing, and business operations. Mr. Kidd is currently serving as senior vice president, Storage Solutions Group and Product Strategy and Development at NetApp.

Mr. Kidd’s board appointment is part of a planned progression as ProStor Systems continues to grow and expand its capabilities and markets in both its RDX removable disk and ProStor InfiniVault systems businesses. As the second independent director from within the storage industry, Mr. Kidd will lend keen insight and perspective to the Company’s near and longer-term strategies and programs complementing the existing Board of Directors from world-class venture capital firms NEA, Sutter Hill Ventures, Boulder Ventures, and Sequel Venture Partners.

"I’m delighted to have Jay join our board as his proven track record in executive management and industry expertise will be a strong complement to our existing board," said Frank Harbist, president and CEO of ProStor Systems. "His stellar career in the storage and networking industries coupled with his extensive cross-functional executive experience in developing and deploying solutions for customer driven organizations will prove invaluable as we move to our next stage of growth."

"ProStor has been able to leverage the 2.5" disk roadmap by defining and developing a new product category and building a sustainable and ever-growing ecosystem around it – leapfrogging competitive tape and optical backup and archive offerings," added Kidd. "I’m excited about helping ProStor expand its market opportunities domestically and globally for the RDX removable disk and ProStor InfiniVault product lines in meeting the solution needs for long term information retention."

As the senior vice president for the Storage Solutions Group and Product Strategy and Development at NetApp, Mr. Kidd oversees the company’s product development portfolio strategy, technical alliance relationships, and NAS, SAN, Data Protection, and Manageability Business Units. He is also a member of the executive staff and the Strategy Council. Before holding this role, Mr. Kidd was the chief marketing officer at NetApp and also ran the Emerging Products Group. Prior to joining NetApp, he held the position of chief technology officer and vice president of product management at Brocade, where he played a key role in developing and implementing the Brocade product road map, including infrastructure and strategic evangelism. Earlier in his career, Mr. Kidd was vice president of marketing for Omneon Video Networks, a supplier of storage and networking equipment for video broadcasters; and Multigen, a real-time 3D simulation software company. He also spent seven years at Silicon Graphics (SGI), where he directed product management and marketing efforts for the graphics workstations, servers, and SGI Web systems business. Similarly at Hewlett Packard, Mr. Kidd held key engineering and product marketing management positions in the Information Networks Group. A graduate of Princeton University, Mr. Kidd holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering and computer science. He is married with three children.