Patrick Dennis President and CEO, Guidance Software

Guidance Software, Inc., in digital investigations, has appointed Patrick Dennis as president and CEO, effective May 1, 2015.

Interim CEO and CFO, Barry Plaga, will remain with the company in the role of CFO.

Before joining Guidance Software, Dennis was a SVP and COO, products and marketing, at EMC Corporation. During his 12-year tenure with EMC, he held executive roles in sales, services and engineering. Most recently, he was responsible for the strategy and operations of EMC’s cloud management division. Previously, he was the group VP of North American storage sales for Oracle Corporation, where his responsibilities included providing leadership, strategy, and development of the company’s North American commercial business.

He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Information Technology from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

“I want to thank Barry Plaga for leading the company during our recent transition, while the Board searched for a permanent CEO,” said Shawn McCreight, COB of directors and CTO, Guidance Software. “Now, we are excited about bringing Patrick with his many years of executive leadership at EMC and Oracle to Guidance Software. With his experience leading a large team that generated over $10 billion dollars in annual revenue, Patrick is highly qualified to lead Guidance Software to realize is full growth potential.”

“I look forward to working with Patrick as we continue to execute on our strategy of enabling and empowering our customers with the best digital investigations solutions and services in the market,” said Plaga.

“Guidance Software has a solid technology platform and market-leading forensics, eDiscovery, incident response and digital investigations products,” said Dennis. “I look forward to working with the team to develop a clear leadership position across those markets by putting in place well-defined product, sales and marketing strategies. This will elevate the company and its products, enabling us to successfully expand into new markets, and ultimately lead to consistent success in the future.”