Ray Villeneuve GM Cloud Storage Acceleration, Riverbed

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced the appointment of Ray Villeneuve as general manager of the cloud storage acceleration business unit. This newly formed business unit will focus on pursuing long-term growth initiatives for the Riverbed Whitewater storage gateway.

 As the General Manager, Villeneuve will have direct responsibility for all strategic and operational activities, including sales, product development, services, marketing and channel development, with an emphasis on activities aimed at growing worldwide sales.

"Ray brings with him a robust storage background, having worked as an executive at NetApp and Auspex, and having been CEO of several storage start-ups. His strong and successful management background shows a proven track record of being results-oriented, and most importantly customer-focused," said Jerry Kennelly, president and CEO at Riverbed. "Riverbed has always put the needs of our customers first, which has led to innovative product developments that directly address ever-changing IT requirements. We’ve laid a solid foundation for the Whitewater business and look forward to the contributions Ray will make to take this business unit to the next level."

Prior to joining Riverbed, Villeneuve held the CEO and President positions at several technology startups, including Liaise, a Silicon Valley company founded with the goal of helping people work faster, smarter and more easily with others by offering a business interaction management solution, and MonoSphere, the creator of a storage capacity management software application for enterprise data centers. Prior to this, Villeneuve was the vice president of marketing at NetApp, where he helped to create that company’s growth strategy and execute worldwide enterprise account penetration, after stints at Sand Hill Systems, MindShare Associates, Acuity, Auspex Sstems, Innovative Products and Peripherals Corporation, SGI and General Electric Calma.

The cloud storage acceleration business unit within Riverbed will focus on product development, marketing strategy, and go-to-market execution for the Whitewater gateway solution. With Whitewater, organizations have a fast, secure and cost-efficient solution to move backup data offsite to public cloud storage environments. Whitewater connects directly to the industry’s most popular backup/restore software tools as well as the cloud service provider application programming interfaces (APIs). It securely accelerates backup and recovery operations, deduplicates and compresses data to reduce storage costs in the cloud and installs without requiring changes to the existing backup infrastructure.

"Riverbed has proven to be an innovation leader over the years. The introduction of the Whitewater storage gateway catapulted the company into a new market where optimizing data protection while maintaining high performance is essential," said Villeneuve. "I’m pleased to join a company with world-class product development and engineering teams that have delivered on a customer-driven roadmap, as well as executive leadership that has set the foundation for success as we execute initiatives to grow the business."