RJ Weigel President, SolidFire

SolidFire, Inc. announced the appointment of three executive positions: RJ Weigel to president, John Hillyard to CFO and Tim Pitcher to VP of SolidFire International.

"SolidFire brings unprecedented opportunities to cloud service providers and the enterprise, and the industry is taking notice," said Dave Wright, CEO of SolidFire. "Our new executives are recognized leaders in the storage space, each with a strong track record of growing businesses for global scale. We are thrilled to welcome such impressive leaders and feel their support validates our unique opportunity in the marketplace."

 RJ Weigel joins the team with over 20 years of experience in accelerating and scaling high tech companies. He comes from HP where he served as VP for Americas Global Accounts – Enterprise Storage Organization, a billion dollar business. He joined HP after its acquisition of 3PAR where he was Worldwide VP of Sales and Field Operations. Prior to that, RJ served as Area VP for NetApp, and spent many years at Cisco Systems as they established routers and Ethernet switching technology within service provider and enterprise customers. As president of SolidFire, RJ will be focused on enhancing the company’s sales and marketing leverage, while helping cloud service providers deliver storage performance backed by firm SLAs and guaranteed QoS.

"This is an exciting time in the storage industry and SolidFire is at the forefront of a significant shift in how businesses leverage the cloud for their performance-sensitive and business-critical applications," said Weigel. "I’ve taken a close look at many of the new companies in the cloud and SSD storage space and no one has the combined technological and competitive advantage that SolidFire has."

 John Hillyard comes to the team as an experienced technology executive bringing over twenty-five years of financial and operations experience in public and ventured backed companies. He has an extensive international background with a track record in high growth companies serving as CFO of DataLogix Inc., CFO of LeftHand Networks and CFO of FrontRange Solutions. At SolidFire, he will provide the operational and financial discipline necessary to grow quickly and responsibly.

"SolidFire has a rock solid product, an impressive customer base, and huge growth potential," said Hillyard. "SolidFire’s patent-pending QoS is changing the rules on the type of applications that business can deploy in the cloud. As the demand for high performance cloud services continues to grow, SolidFire is in a great position to support cloud providers and enterprises in meeting this need."

 Tim Pitcher also joins the team with international experience. He most recently served as senior director of Global Account Storage at HP after its acquisition of 3PAR where his primary responsibilities included retaining 3PAR customers and leading HP global storage growth. Previous to that, he was VP of 3PAR where he focused on the growth of customers, channel base and strategic service providers in EMEA and Asia. He brings over twenty years of IT experience and will be working to expand SolidFire’s global presence and will be based out of London, England.

"Cloud computing has a very strong uptake in Europe with mandates in both the public and private sector that are driving adoption," said Pitcher. "SolidFire already has an established presence in Europe and at it is time to extend our reach world-wide." About SolidFire SolidFire delivers high-performance data storage systems for cloud service providers. Leveraging an all-flash scale-out storage architecture with patented volume-level QoS controls, providers can now guarantee storage performance to thousands of applications within shared infrastructures. By using real-time data reduction techniques and system-wide automation, SolidFire is fueling new and profitable block-storage services that are advancing the way the world uses the cloud."