Quoting DMReview

Acopia Networks, a leader in high-performance enterprise file virtualization, announced the appointment of Kirby Wadsworth as senior vice president of marketing and business development. A skilled professional with extensive storage industry experience in both emerging and established companies, Wadsworth will lead the company's global marketing and business development functions reporting directly to Acopia's president and chief executive officer, Christopher Lynch.

"Kirby's incredible depth of experience and knowledge will be instrumental in helping to shape Acopia's marketing and business development efforts into a world-class organization tasked with both furthering the recognition and trust in the Acopia brand, as well as growing an expanded channel partner network characterized by deeper and stronger relationships," said Lynch. "We are delighted to be able to attract someone of Kirby's caliber to the executive management team during what I believe is to be one of the most strategic periods in the company's evolution and growth."

"The opportunity to lead Acopia's worldwide marketing and business development effort was irresistible," said Wadsworth. "In the recent TheInfoPro's (TIP) Heat Index survey, file virtualization jumped from the 15th to 6th position, indicating that adoption will double this year alone. Acopia already leads this market with an enviable slate of enthusiastic, brand-name customers. I am thrilled to join what I believe is the most stellar team in the industry today, as we build Acopia into the most recognized and trusted brand in the marketplace."

Said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), "The infrastructure virtualization market is exploding and file-based solutions are getting hotter every day. Acopia is moving on to the next phase - having acquired huge customers and momentum - they need to start telling the world what they have to offer. Kirby has been at the forefront of many storage industry transformations, and it looks like he might just be doing it again at Acopia."

"Today's broadly distributed computing environments - exemplified by SOA and Web 2.0 architectures - require careful consideration of the ways distributed data is used, stored and managed. File virtualization shows potential as a means to enable enhanced management and control in vastly distributed architectures," said recognized industry visionary, Jon William Toigo, managing principal of Toigo Partners International and founder of the Data Management Institute. "Rather than recentralizing file-based data, which violates the 80/20 rule of networks, some sort of file virtualization technology is needed to enable data to be placed where it is accessed and used, while enabling management discipline. Kirby and I have worked together in many of his previous lives and he impresses me as a marketing expert who is also a competent technologist: a rare combination. I'm delighted to see him working with Chris Lynch to transform the world of file management at Acopia. Together, they could well forge the current "marketectures" surrounding file virtualization into the real architectures that business urgently needs."

Wadsworth joins Acopia from Revivio where, as senior vice president of marketing and business development, he was pivotal in creating the continuous data protection (CDP) market. Prior to Revivio, Mr. Wadsworth co-founded and served as vice president of marketing and business development at Storability, a pioneer in managed storage services, which was subsequently acquired by StorageTek. Prior to Storability, Wadsworth served as vice president and general manager of Compaq's Network Storage Services Business Unit, where he created the Enterprise Storage Network Architecture (ENSA) and led the early market introduction of multi-vendor storage networking.

Wadsworth serves as an adjunct professor of marketing at Babson College's F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business and the Sawyer School of Business at Suffolk University. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events, and a contributing author to numerous publications.

The original article is here.