Gluster, the leading provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions for private and public clouds, today announced Mike Backlund has joined the company as senior vice president of sales. As a seasoned sales veteran with over 24 years' experience, Backlund brings significant expertise in scaling companies to become well-established businesses with significant revenues. At Gluster, Backlund will be responsible for driving both domestic and international sales.

"Mike will help Gluster fully capitalize on the demand for our commercial solutions, which continues to build as more enterprises seek out scalable storage solutions that can reliably support their cloud deployments," said Ben Golub, president and CEO of Gluster. "At Gluster, we have the technical expertise and a radically better solution to solve some of the most pressing issues facing enterprise computing. With Mike's strong sales leadership, we are well positioned to further leverage our substantial price and performance advantages in the market."

Prior to joining Gluster, Backlund was senior vice president of worldwide sales at Baynote, Inc., a provider of personalization and digital marketing optimization solutions, where he grew revenue by 57 percent in 2009 and 75 percent in 2010. During his time at Baynote, Backlund also held the position of interim CEO.  Previously, Backlund was CEO at Quorum Labs and built its sales organization, recruited initial partners, and productized and launched the company's first solution. Throughout his long career, Backlund also held executive sales positions at open source pioneer SpikeSource as well as Computer Associates. As senior vice president of field operations at Interwoven, Backlund led the company from less than one million to over $200 million in annual revenue and a successful IPO.

"I have a lot of experiencing in taking companies to the next level by developing the organization's sales division, consequently increasing revenue," said Backlund. "The cloud is the new reality of the enterprise computing model, and I am eager to join a company that has such a strong solution for cloud storage and is addressing a huge pain point for businesses."