Ryan Taylor, Director of EMEA Sales, Virident

Virident Systems Inc. announced the appointment of former DataDirect Networks and Hitachi Data Systems employees, Ryan Taylor and Mark Lucas, as the company’s new director of sales and its new systems engineering manager, respectively.

They bring 35 years of storage and networking experience to Virident’s EMEA team to develop the company’s sales and engineering programs.

Taylor will report to Terry Flynn, Virident’s VP of EMEA sales. He brings more than 15 years of experience in enterprise storage, backup and data management, providing integrated solutions to help customers manage unstructured data growth and form the foundation for their big data strategy. Prior to joining Virident, he worked for DDN as the content cloud and media manager for Northern Europe. Before that, he was a file and contensales director for southern Europe at HDS. He has a track record of developing sales campaigns and building relationships with customers and business partners alike. His responsibilities at Virident include building a customer base and assisting with the enablement of the company’s existing and future strategic partnerships.

Lucas, systems engineering manager for EMEA, has worked in the storage and networking industries for 20 years, starting as a junior systems engineer and working up to a senior systems engineering manager. He previously worked for DDN as a pre-sales systems engineering manager, where he helped build the pre-sales systems engineering team and develop pre-sales support for all products sets. Prior to that, he worked for HDS as an EMEA file and content systems engineering director, heading up the EMEA pre-sales support team. He has also worked at EDS, NetApp and BlueArc, supporting storage projects in a pre-sales capacity in the enterprise, cloud, content and media spaces. Lucas’ responsibilities at Virident will include building and promoting solid customer technical-to-business value propositions, designing, sizing and assisting with customer enablement using the company’s current and future strategic hardware and software products.

“As Virident positions itself to lead the flash platform transformation, EMEA is a key market for the company in terms of growth,” said Flynn. “Mark and Ryan are key hires for the company’s expanding influence in EMEA, bringing their experience in sales and engineering to what promises to be a well-rounded partner program.”