Mike Smith VP of Product Marketing for Solarflare

Solarflare Communications, Inc., in standards-based 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) silicon, has expanded its executive team by hiring Mike Smith as vice president of product marketing, responsible for product management and product marketing. With his background in storage networking and controllers, Mike will play an important role as original equipment manufacturers (OEMS) bring to market 10GbE switch and server products based on Solarflare’s 10GbE silicon.

“We are delighted to welcome Mike to the Solarflare team,” said Russell Stern, chief executive officer of Solarflare. “Mike has deep relationships with many OEMs, including EMC, HP, IBM and Sun. As our product line matures this year for OEM readiness, Mike’s skills and connections will be a great addition to drive design wins and revenue.”

Previously, Mike was executive vice president of worldwide marketing at Emulex, a leader in the storage networking market. At Emulex, he played a key role in driving product strategy and engagements and was instrumental in securing design wins with major OEMs. Prior to joining Emulex, Mike held various marketing management roles at Adaptec and spent 10 years at Western Digital. He holds a master’s in business administration from University of California, Irvine and a bachelor’s degree from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

“What attracted me to Solarflare is the strength of its team, technology portfolio and its 10GbE leadership position,” said Mike Smith. “Cloud computing, server virtualization, LAN/SAN network convergence and low latency UDP multicast for market data applications all drive the need for 10GbE Ethernet. Solarflare has the silicon portfolio that delivers the performance, low power and low cost needed to enable broad 10GbE Ethernet adoption.”