Charlie Leeming Chief Sales Officer, Vexata

Vexata, Inc. is accelerating its market expansion plans and has appointed Charlie Leeming as chief sales officer.

He brings leadership experience to Vexata, built upon a background at start-ups and industry leaders, including 16 years at Brocade, where he was responsible for growing its core business to over $2 billion annually.

At Vexata, he is building an enterprise sales organization, as well as forging reseller partnerships and strategic alliances to accelerate adoption of the company’s products and solutions.

“Vexata has developed a system that completely disrupts the economics of deploying scalable infrastructure. To maximize Vexata’s far-reaching potential, one must have a deep understanding of storage, databases, networking and data processing,” said CEO Zahid Hussain. “There is no better C-level sales executive than Charlie to lead our sales organization, given his proven background in selling complex data center solutions and his ability to create a robust ecosystem of go-to-market partners and suppliers that are necessary in helping our customers solve their biggest data center problems.”

Vexata launched in September 2017, after almost four years in stealth mode. It introduced a fast all-flash storage system powered by the Active Data Architecture – a software layer for managing active data in modern workloads including AI, transactional databases, machine learning and real-time analytics.  By removing the I/O bottlenecks between storage, servers, processors, databases and network switches, it enables companies to expand their business-critical data infrastructure at a cost/performance ratio.

By the end of 2017, the company had completed dozens of PoC tests and signed customers including Oath, Tata Consultancy, Pacific Data Center and Sanmina – all of which are facing next-generation data management problems. These enterprise customers are able to reduce storage latency, and consequently are achieving tenfold or greater performance than the leading flash solutions in the market at a fraction of the cost. 

Below are examples:
• Vexata VX-100 was chosen by a Fortune 1000 company to replace an entrenched storage competitor for its top performance tier when the storage architect found that the performance was far superior. The company was able to consolidate the infrastructure into a third of the physical space while increasing performance by tenfold – all without needing to replace the existing switches and servers.
• Was selected by a national bank card processing center to power the transactional system behind its entire Anetwork throughout the country.
• Another company deployed Vexata to consolidate an Oracle database footprint from 16 instances to two, and also mitigated data center sprawl. The company is now able to obtain similar performance metrics running on VMs as is typically seen only on bare metal servers.

“After learning many first-hand experiences about how Vexata accelerates modern data center workloads, the decision to join the company became very easy,” said Leeming. “The depth of the company’s intellectual property portfolio is so differentiated that our customers utilize the technology to create a competitive advantage. Simply put, Vexata technology lights up SSD media, accelerating compute, analytics and database infrastructure for faster, more accurate outcomes, all while dramatically lowering risk and TCO. Not only do customers gain performance headroom on their current workloads, but they see Vexata as a foundation for their strategic growth initiatives including IoT, machine learning and AI.”

Leeming brings more than 25 years of experience in storage, real-time analytics, AI and machine learning; and has introduced data-centric cloud and enterprise technologies to the global market. His strategies have helped corporations like Brocade Communications, Toshiba and IBM define market segments and enable their sales organizations to deliver complete solutions while maximizing profitable revenue growth. During his tenure, he also established new market segments for data-center technology including in IP storage networking, converged systems and embedded switching.

Read also:
Exclusive Interview With Zahid Hussain, CEO and Co-Founder, Vexata
In all-flash array
by Philippe Nicolas | 2018.01.31 | News