Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization and virtual infrastructure software, today announced that former EMC and Avamar executive, Ed Walsh, has joined the company as president and chief executive officer. Walsh takes the reins at the fast-growing company from John C. Thibault who remains with the company as executive chairman focusing on the company’s strategic direction. In a separate announcement, the company also announced the appointment of former EMC and McData sales executive John McCarthy as senior vice president of sales. In this role, McCarthy will lead the company’s worldwide sales, channel and field operations.

Walsh brings 18+ years of experience to Virtual Iron with demonstrated leadership capabilities in both start-up and public companies. This includes a strong track record establishing emerging companies as market leaders, creating new market segments, driving effective channel go-to-market strategies and developing strong partner ecosystems with companies such as CA, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp and Symantec.

"The market opportunity for Virtual Iron is almost limitless,” said John C. Thibault, executive chairman of Virtual Iron. “The company has built an outstanding product, established a strong channel and customer base and has great momentum. With the addition of Ed, we are extremely well-positioned to accelerate that success and maximize our market opportunity. We’re thrilled he is joining us at such an explosive time in the company’s growth.”

Most recently, Walsh was vice president and general manager of EMC’s Information Management Software Group. Prior to joining EMC, Walsh served as CEO at Avamar Technologies, Inc., a venture-backed software firm acquired by EMC in late 2006. At Avamar, Walsh established the company as the leader in the next generation data protection and data de-duplication software market and led it to 700% revenue growth over 18 months. Avamar’s data de-duplication product received, along with VMware, one of the first Morgan Stanley IT Innovation Awards, recognizing the most impactful technologies in the data center. Previously, Walsh was senior vice president of sales, marketing and alliances for CNT, a publicly-traded storage networking company. There he re-aligned the company’s channel and go-to-market strategy and led CNT to record growth and profitability. CNT was acquired by McData Corporation in 2005. Prior to CNT, Walsh co-founded Articulent, a systems integrator and channel reseller focused on data management solutions.

Virtual Iron competes in the fast-growing server virtualization market where industry experts expect software sales to grow to $7 billion in 2011 from $800 million in 2006. Current penetration of virtualization on installed x86 servers is estimated at just 6% today and Virtual Iron has quickly positioned itself to get its fair share of the untapped market. By combining ease of use with advanced capabilities the company has doubled its number of customers and revenues every quarter since its launch in Q4, 2006. The company has also dramatically expanded its worldwide distribution channel including Tier 1 distribution agreements with Tech Data in North America, Avnet in Europe and reseller agreements with HP and Dell. In addition, the company recently announced the availability of bundled offerings with HP and IBM through Tech Data in North America.

“Ed Walsh is a proven leader and he brings an exemplary track record of success to Virtual Iron,” said David Skok, Virtual Iron board member and general partner at Matrix Partners. “He brings the right combination of strategic partner, channel go-to-market and product leadership experience to build on the early customer success and market position the company has established under John Thibault’s leadership. Ed is well qualified to accelerate Virtual Iron’s growth and take the company to the next level.”

Virtual Iron provides easy-to-use, enterprise-class capabilities on a next-generation architecture, significantly reducing the obstacles to mainstream market adoption. The platform combines the latest version of the Xen® open source hypervisor with advanced virtualization services and policy-based automation capabilities such as LiveMigrate™, LiveRecovery™ and LiveCapacity™. It also takes full advantage of the latest hardware–assisted virtualization capabilities from AMD and Intel to deliver near native performance. Users leverage Virtual Iron to support a broad range of data center initiatives including server consolidation, development and test optimization, cost-effective high availability/disaster recovery, dynamic capacity management and load balancing, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

“Virtual Iron has fundamentally changed the landscape in server virtualization by eliminating the primary obstacles to mainstream market growth,” said Ed Walsh, new president and CEO of Virtual Iron. “By reducing complexity without sacrificing capability, the company delivers on the demands of a huge segment of the virtualization market and creates a tremendous opportunity for success.”