Steve Houck Senior VP WW Sales, Astute Networks

Astute Networks, Inc. announced the
appointment of two executives to its team: Steven Houck, senior vice president
of worldwide sales and Jay Kramer, vice president of worldwide marketing.

The
addition of Houck and Kramer rounds out Astute Networks’ management team and
brings expertise to the company as it expands its leadership in the data
center infrastructure, cloud and virtualization markets. Both executives will
report directly to CEO Steve Topper.

"With the addition of Steve and Jay, Astute has the strategic
team in place to grow the company into a world-class, market-leading
organization," said Steve Topper, CEO of Astute Networks. "In the
past few years, we have invested heavily in R&D to define and develop
innovative solutions that solve real customer problems. We’ve built a channel
friendly go-to-market strategy that reflects our deep understanding of the
complexities customers face when implementing a virtualization strategy. By
augmenting our strong technical teams with Steve and Jay’s real-world domain
expertise and successes in global sales, strategic partnership, channel
development and technology marketing, Astute is well positioned to scale its
business to market leadership.

As Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Houck will be
responsible for developing Astute Networks’ global sales strategy and growing
company revenue. Houck is a technology veteran with 20 years experience scaling
global sales channels and partner programs for both private and public
companies in North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America.
Prior to joining Astute Networks, Houck held various executive positions at
VMware including vice president of worldwide channels and vice
president/general manager, Latin America.
Houck also served as vice president worldwide SMB sales at EMC where he was
chartered with and successfully developed the SMB storage market for EMC
Corporation. Houck held the position of CEO at Gridtree, a cloud services
company serving enterprises throughout Latin America.
He has also held various sales leadership positions including executive vice
president of worldwide sales at Corel Corporation.

Kramer brings 25 years experience in the technology industry
to his role as vice president of worldwide marketing at Astute, where he will
spearhead the company’s efforts to build a leadership position in the
fast-growing global market for virtualization solutions addressing mid-market
and enterprise infrastructure and cloud deployments. Prior to joining Astute
Networks, Kramer was the vice president of worldwide marketing at SEPATON; a
vice president of worldwide marketing at iStor; and a vice president of
marketing at Maxtor and CDS. Kramer had also held executive positions in sales,
marketing and strategic planning at Unisys Corporation. He has served on the
Board of Directors and in chairperson positions for both the Storage Network
Industry Association (SNIA) and the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA).
He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Flash Memory Summit.

Houck and Kramer are joining Astute Networks’
management team, which includes Keith Klarer, vice president of hardware
engineering; Simon Knee, vice president of software engineering and Robert
Harling, vice president of operations.