Steve Ackley Chief Revenue Officer – Portworx

Portworxn Inc., the cloud-native storage company modern enterprises trust to manage data in containers, announced Steve Ackley as chief revenue officer and Kent Munson as director of solutions architecture and customer success. 

The company also announced the opening of two new sales regions in EMEA and North America.

These new executive additions bring experience in software-defined infrastructure and customer experience management and will support Portworx’s large and growing global customer base, including 22 of the Fortune Global 1000. 

“Today’s most progressive businesses recognize container data management and multi-cloud operations as critical aspects of digital transformation and rely on Portworx technology to manage their stateful services on any infrastructure,” said Murli Thirumale, CEO and co-founder. “Our vision is to provide a cutting-edge cloud native storage solution that speaks to the heart of our customers’ everyday business needs. With Steve and Kent’s combined experience, we look forward to continuing to enable leading enterprises to accelerate the deployment of containerized applications.”

Steve Ackley
He brings nearly thirty years of experience selling hardware, infrastructure software, and data analytics frameworks to global enterprises. Over the course of his career, he has generated over $1 billion in shareholder value leading global field sales team’s for SaaS based technology companies including SAP, Altiscale (SAP), Packet Design (Ciena), Vicinity (Microsoft), Marimba (BMC), Tivoli (IBM) and Sun Microsystems (Oracle). He will apply his knowledge in building worldwide sales teams and establishing strategic alliances.

“Portworx is leading the charge in the new category of cloud native data management, and is changing how today’s leading businesses are able to better build and run cloud native applications at scale,” said Ackley. “As the company succeeds at simplifying how enterprises manage cloud-native architectures, I’m looking forward to playing a part in the ongoing mission to modernize data management and extend this strategy into EMEA, APJ, and beyond.“

Kent Munson
He has more than twenty years of experience in managing cloud and software-defined data center technologies. In his previous positions at F5 Networks, Intransa, Spirent Communications, Microsoft and SwanLabs, he was pivotal in product development and innovative solutions on current technologies virtualization platforms for cloud infrastructures. In his role, he will leverage this experience to extend Portworx’s reach into global enterprise brands.

“What makes Portworx distinct is its rich customer base comprised of Fortune 1000 organizations,” says Munson. “While application containerization is growing rapidly, the benefits and long-term business value of adopting these architectures are still largely untapped. I look forward to working with this impressive customer roster and ensuring they’re making the most of their container investments.“

These hires and new sales regions come as the latest in a series of recent corporate momentum. Earlier this year, Portworx announced it achieved more than 73% customer growth since 4Q17 including individual purchases of over a $1 million and production clusters over 100 nodes in size. In addition to net new customers, the firm has reported confidence from existing Fortune 1000 customers, including GE Digital, who have expanded their usage of Portworx’s solution for running stateful containers in production, PX-Enterprise. Of the company’s existing customers, 66% are already running Portworx in production, and 30% have purchased additional licenses after experiencing production success with stateful containers.