Molly Rector CMO, DDN …

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced the appointment of the company’s first CMO, Molly Rector.

 With nearly 15 years of experience working in HPC, media and entertainment, and enterprise IT industries, she has joined the DDN team to expand the adoption of its product portfolio to new markets.

“Cloud, media and entertainment, and enterprise IT environments are now grappling with the same massive compute and data management demands that HPC technology was designed to address,” says Rector, “The DDN product line that has fulfilled the needs of several Nobel prize winners and the HPC market solves the needs of a much broader industry in 2014 and beyond due to massive data growth and demand for data analytics.”

Rector’s experience in HPC and the new markets DDN is focusing on will help to accelerate 2014 company growth and product adoption. She is a founding member and currently serves as COB for the Active Archive Alliance. She is also the Storage Networking Industry Association‘s vice COB and the analytics and big data committee vice chairman.

She is reporting to CEO Alex Bouzari and replaces Jeff Denworth who is leaving the company to pursue other opportunities.

In addition to her thought leadership experience, Rector brings a wealth of ‘challenger brand’ marketing knowledge to her role as the leader of DDN’s worldwide marketing and product management programs. At DDN, she will be responsible for providing customer and market input into the company’s product roadmap, raising the corporate brand visibility outside traditional markets, expanding the partner ecosystem and driving the end-to-end customer experience from definition to delivery to ensure customer delight.

Prior to joining DDN, she was responsible for product management and worldwide marketing as CMO at Spectra Logic. During her tenure, the company grew revenues by double digits year-over-year, while also maintaining profitability.

Bouzari said: “I am delighted to welcome Molly to the DDN family as we engage more closely with our customers and partners to scale their businesses. She is a strategic, results-driven marketing leader with the unique credentials we were looking for in a CMO. Her success in enabling technology companies to integrate their marketing and sales efforts to achieve maximum results, while disrupting the competitive landscape and delivering a great customer experience is well regarded.”