Management Team
Scott Genereux | President & CEO
Under Scott Genereux's visionary strategy, Nirvanix has become the recognized leader in the enterprise cloud storage market as demonstrated by signing an OEM pact with IBM, implementing the largest private cloud in the world, securing more petabytes under management in 2011 than the prior 3 years combined, and strengthening its competitive positioning by diversifying its cloud storage portfolio to encompass private and hybrid cloud services. Genereux joined Nirvanix from QLogic Corp. where he served as senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing. While at QLogic Genereux spearheaded an aggressive sales push to expand the company's presence in Fibre Channel and InfiniBand switching, forging successful design wins at tier-one OEMs such as Dell, EMC, HP, and IBM. Prior to QLogic, he was at DataDirect Networks (DDN), as senior vice president of worldwide sales, marketing and support. At DDN, Genereux increased revenue in 2008 at a rate twice as fast as the prior year; expanded the company into new market segments; significantly raised its profile in the industry and introduced its first-ever indirect channel organization. Prior to DDN, Genereux headed up a $2.7B global storage business for Hitachi, Ltd.'s Data Systems unit (HDS) as senior vice president of worldwide sales, marketing and support. He is credited with significantly expanding the company's addressable market by focusing the global sales organization on midrange storage platforms and heterogeneous virtualization solutions while diversifying its revenue stream through HP, Sun and over 1,500 VARs worldwide.
Major Horton | Chief Financial Officer
Major Horton brings over 20 years of finance and operations leadership experience to Nirvanix. Horton joins Nirvanix with deep experience from information technology companies, most recently as the SVP – CFO & Treasurer for Rackspace Managed Hosting, as well as serving as the VP of Finance & Segment Controller for Dell's Enterprise Customer Segment, and the VP & General Manager of the Commercial Financing Group at Dell Financial Services. Prior to Dell, Horton was the Director of Corporate Financial Planning & Analysis for AlliedSignal and he spent his early career with General Motors and Deloitte & Touché. Horton holds a Master of Science in Management from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Kettering University.
Paul Froutan | Chief Technology Officer
Paul Froutan joins Nirvanix from Google where he was Head of Worldwide Data Center Infrastructure. At Nirvanix, Froutan will be responsible for driving long-term cloud storage strategy and vision in anticipation of market direction and customer and partner needs. In collaboration with Nirvanix's Engineering Organization, Froutan will chart the future technology direction of the company to further develop its services and optimize data center efficiency to support Nirvanix's increasing base of enterprise-class customers. Froutan has extensive experience in the cloud services industry. In his position at Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) he was responsible for designing, building and managing the extremely high levels of reliability and efficiency in Google's global green data center operations. Prior to Google, Froutan was Vice President of Product Development at Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX), where he led the team that pioneered the launch of Rackspace Cloud and other key managed services. Froutan holds a patent for Exterminator™, the first Intrusion Detection and Response System in the hosting industry. He also designed and implemented PrivateNet™, the first private back-end network offered by managed service providers to enable secure communication between a customer's servers in multiple physical locations.
Erik Hardy | Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales
Erik Hardy has an optimal balance of both start-up sales experience and managing large, global field sales for tier one IT vendors such as Mercury Interactive (acquired by HP) and Hitachi, Ltd.'s Data Systems unit (HDS). Hardy has nearly 20 years of sales management experience – including 13 with EMC, where he was most recently Vice President of Global Accounts for North America. Hardy joins Nirvanix from Xsigo Systems, a maker of virtual I/O technologies, where he successfully grew revenue 10-fold in a period of less than 24 months. Hardy holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Randall S. Hollis | Vice President of Engineering and Operations
Randy Hollis brings over 30 years of experience in the management of engineering, operations and quality in the storage industry to Nirvanix where he will focus on leading engineering resources to transform the company's future vision for cloud storage into a tangible reality. Randy has held senior positions at HP, LeftHand Networks, Quantum, ADIC, Maxtor and StorageTek. At HP he ran HP/LeftHand's development engineering team after the acquisition and, most recently, the New Product Introduction team for the HP StorageWorks Division. As VP of Development Engineering and Operations for LeftHand Networks (one of the world's leading IP SAN companies), he was responsible for R&D, development engineering, supply chain, quality, customer service and support, facilities, and product testing. Prior to LeftHand Networks, Randy was the Vice President of Global Operations for ADIC and Quantum. He also held management positions for operations and engineering at Maxtor and StorageTek. His collegiate studies were in Mathematics and Metallurgical Engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
Karen Sigman | Vice President, OEM and Alliances
As Vice President, OEM and Alliances at Nirvanix, Karen Sigman is responsible for growing current partner relationships and expanding the Nirvanix OEM and strategic alliances portfolio to include major global companies with deep reach into the enterprise storage market. Sigman has extensive experience in networking and storage, having held OEM and channel management positions at QLogic (Nasdaq: QLGC), Hitachi Data Systems (NYSE: HIT), DataDomain and IBM. At QLogic, Sigman secured major design wins for converged networking technology with OEMs such as Oracle and Sun. At Hitachi Data Systems, Sigman grew channel and OEM revenue from 10% to over 50% of total company revenue and grew the midrange storage business by 5X in only three years. Sigman has been recognized by VARBusiness as one of the Top 50 Most Powerful Women of the Channel several times as well as a Top 60 Channel Executive. The channel program she led at Hitachi Data Systems received the 5-Star Rating by VAR Business for three consecutive years.
Steve Zivanic | Vice President of Marketing
Steve Zivanic brings over 12 years of global marketing experience to Nirvanix. Prior to joining in January, 2011, Zivanic served as senior director of Corporate Communications at networking pioneer QLogic, where he spearheaded the company's marketing initiatives to capture mindshare in the hotly contested converged networking space. While at QLogic, Zivanic was responsible for OEM Marketing, Channel Marketing, Investor Communication Strategies and Corporate Communications initiatives. Based on the rise of QLogic's switching business, Zivanic successfully positioned the company as a core data center brand, transcending its roots as primarily an HBA vendor. Prior to QLogic, Zivanic served as vice president of Corporate Communications at DataDirect Networks (DDN), where he significantly raised the profile of the company with a high impact marketing campaign centered around Warner Bros.' "The Dark Knight." Prior to DDN, Zivanic served as senior director of Corporate Communications at Hitachi Ltd.'s Data Systems unit, where he led the global Corporate Communications function and helped establish the company as a thought leader in the storage industry. He is credited with successfully positioning Hitachi as a leader in heterogeneous data center storage virtualization solutions. Zivanic holds a Bachelor of Science in Public Relations from San Jose State University.