John Morris CEO, Cleversafe

Cleversafe Inc. has named John Morris president and CEO.

The former Juniper Networks and IBM executive brings proven business leadership credentials to Cleversafe as it is reaching milestones in petabytes shipped and patents awarded. He will focus on expanding Cleversafe’s go-to-market strategy and accelerating its current momentum in capitalizing on the growth opportunity presented by the expanding global digital storage market.

Founder Chris Gladwin has been named vice chairman and will continue to drive Cleversafe’s technology vision and lead strategic innovation for the company’s dispersed object-storage technology.

"I was struck by Cleversafe’s breakthrough approach to helping customers with their hyper-scale digital storage growth – it truly challenges the status quo within the industry," said Morris. "Our strategy and technology is rapidly gaining traction in the market, and I am excited to bring my experience in helping companies scale to reach new levels of growth and revenue to the Cleversafe leadership team."

 Morris brings experience in growing emerging stage businesses as well as multi-billion dollar technology leaders. As a member of the executive committee of Juniper Networks, he drove over a billion dollars of topline growth. As president and COO of payments industry start-up Pay By Touch, he similarly led the company’s expansion from zero retail stores to thousands, and attracted millions of enrolled consumers to use its biometric payment service. Prior to that, he spent 23 years at IBM in several senior executive roles and led the company to record growth in its mainframe business and other units, including growth in the AsiaPac region.

Christopher Galvin, former chairman of NAVTEQ Inc., former chairman and CEO of Motorola Inc. and COB for Cleversafe said: "We are thrilled to have John join Cleversafe at a time when we’re seeing very encouraging early customer adoption of our extensively patented object storage technology. Our founder, Chris Gladwin, imagined Cleversafe’s groundbreaking technology and introduced it to the market. As a member of the board of directors, Chris Gladwin voted unanimously with his fellow directors to endorse John as his successor. The board and I are convinced that Chris Gladwin’s technology and founding spirit teamed with John Morris’ global-scale leadership and go-to-market experience will take Cleversafe to the next level."

Chris Gladwin, founder and vice chairman for Cleversafe, added: "John brings invaluable experience to the company at an important moment in time. It’s rewarding to see the success that we’ve achieved thus far, and to have the opportunity to continue to build on that success by solving the most challenging problems in today’s enterprise environments. I look forward to working with John and to continuing to be a part of Cleversafe by focusing on innovative uses of our technology and on ways our customers and partners can achieve their overall business objectives."