Rick Ruskin SVP of WW Sales, Violin

Violin Systems LLC named technology industry sales veteran Rick Ruskin as SVP of worldwide sales.

In this role, he will be responsible for sales, systems engineering and worldwide sales operations, reporting to Ebrahim Abbasi, CEO and president.
 
“Expanding our go-to-market leadership team is of paramount importance as we re-embark on our path to innovation and growth. Rick’s leadership, industry knowledge, experience and customer advocacy will accelerate our growth,” said Abbasi.
 
Ruskin has 30 years’ experience growing companies to be market leaders in areas of storage, virtualization, security and e-discovery. He comes to Violin from Kaminario, where he was VP of North America channel sales, leading growth by forming alliances with strategic partners and OEM relationships. Prior to Kaminario, he held senior sales and executive management positions at companies including Storiant, VDX, eG Innovations, Lumigent Software, VIRTERA, Index Engines, MTI Technology and Storability Software.
 
“I’m eager to help spearhead Violin’s efforts into furthering their reach to businesses around the world looking to leverage innovative storage technologies that will help them get the the most from their enterprise storage environments,” said Ruskin.  “I strongly believe Violin provides tremendous opportunities for enterprises to enhance their infrastructures through Violin’s innovation and cost effective solutions. I look forward to applying my industry experience to exponentially grow Violin’s business through customer advocacy and product leadership.“
 
He will be charged with extending the reach of flash storage platform that helps solve the complex storage needs of organizations across a variety of industries, including healthcare, communications and financial markets. The platform allows organizations to deploy a vertically integrated design of software, firmware and hardware to enable the transition of storage from legacy solutions to enterprise, all-flash storage, transforming data center economics.
 
“Rick has a proven history of dramatically growing his companies’ businesses through identifying market opportunities and ensuring that sales are closed,” said Abbasi. “As we continue to extend the reach of Violin solutions to markets across the globe, we look to leverage Rick’s success for our own benefit and for the benefit of companies looking to solve their business challenges by simplifying their storage, their data center and their businesses themselves with our flash storage platform.”