Mike Wall President and CEO, Atempo

Atempo, Inc. announced that Michael V. Wall, an Atempo board member since 2008, has been named President and CEO.

Former CEO and industry storage veteran, Neal Ater, who has served as Chairman and CEO since 2006, will remain as Chairman of the Board.

As a current board member of Atempo, Wall has contributed strategic insight and direction to the company’s global strategy and expansion for the past three years. A founding member of the management team that developed Intel’s storage business, Wall brings over 30 years of industry leadership and over 13 years of storage experience to the company. Prior to joining Atempo, Wall served as the CEO of DICOM Grid where he led a turnaround of the company and secured their A series funding. Before joining Intel, Wall was general manager at Cray Research, responsible for North American operations.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and received his Masters of Management Sciences from Averill Harriman College for Urban and Policy Sciences, at SUNY Stony Brook.

"Mike’s strong contributions as a board member have been pivotal in guiding Atempo’s expansion and product direction, and I’m excited for the next stage in the company’s growth under his leadership," said Neal Ater. "It’s been an honor to serve as Atempo’s CEO, and I’m looking forward to remaining involved with the company and supporting Mike from my role as Chairman."

Over the last five-plus years while Ater served as CEO, Atempo continued to innovate in the field of data protection and aggressively expanded into the archiving market. The license revenues for Atempo Digital Archive grew by more than 250% since 2009. Atempo also formed a number of partnerships with leaders including Apple, BlueArc (now a part of HDS), Dell, Isilon, Omneon (now a part of Harmonic) and SpectraLogic, and most recently, launched Atempo Live Navigator, the CDP data protection solution for remote offices, desktops and laptops.

"Over the last three years I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with Atempo’s management team, and in particular, Neal, who is extremely well-respected in the industry and has led the company through a number of significant milestones," said Michael Wall. "I am very much looking forward to taking over the reins and continuing the company’s global growth and innovations in the archiving and data management space."

Comments

It's rare to get an executive with a better background for a company.

Mike Wall held several marketing management positions at IBM in NYC: he is aware of marketing, and Big Blue has good reputation in this field.

He was GM at Cray Research and GM of Intel's Supercomputer Systems Division: so he knows what is a computer, and a big one.

He was in the management team that developed Intel's storage $500 million business: so he knows storage, and deep storage.

And he just left DICOM Grid, start-up in cloud SaaS platform for medical imaging applications that secures $7.5 million in funding where the was CEO - and continues to be at the board -, which means three advantages: he knows how to handle a company, how to raise money, and is the perfect guy for Atempo now trying to expand by pushing its recent digital archive software - more than its Time Navigator backup software - especially in the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) market -, after the acquisition of Lighthouse Global in 2008.

Incidentally Wall currently sits on the boards of DICOM Grid, Atempo, and Nirvanix.

Atempo is lucky to get such a new president, CEO and board's director, who succeed Neal Ater since 2006 when he replaced Rick Wojcik and began to move the headquarters of the company in Palo Alto, CA.

Will it be enough for Atempo to finally explode. This U.S. company, born in France 19 years ago - under the name of Quadratec - desperately remained a small firm after spending as much as $$38.2 million in financial funding. If you compare it with CommVault that started later with the same kind of backup software to become now a highly successful public company, getting $161 million following an IPO in 2006, and currently one of the most growing storage firm in the world?

If Atempo doesn't succeed with Wall, who could do it? Maybe it's the last chance for Atempo to climb a wall that it never crossed.