Brenda Zawatski, ILM vice president first at Storage Technology Corp and then at Sun, has moved to the high-profile, Ellison-backed start-up Pillar Data Systems.
Zawatski is a storage industry veteran, and she joined StorageTek last year, only months before Sun declared its intention to buy StorageTek. The merger was announced in June, and during that summer Zawatski made clear her desire to leave.
Pillar approached Zawatski in October, and Zawatski stayed at Sun for a little while to help manage the post-merger transition. I probably stayed on for a month or two longer at Sun. It wasn’t a knock-down drag-out battle. I left on good terms, she said.
Pillar launched its mid-range, virtualized file and block-level disk arrays last summer, and has since scored over 100 sales, and a 30% repeat sales rate. The company is funded exclusively by billionaire Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who has so far pumped a healthy $150m into Pillar.
With that backing, a product that has been highly rated by analysts, and a management team sporting impressive resumes, Pillar is very widely tipped for success.
Before she joined StorageTek, Zawatski spent two years at Veritas Software Corp, where she was marketing vice president. Before that, she spent 21 years at IBM, where her posts included vice president of Tivoli storage software, and vice president of removable media storage solutions. Pillar’s CEO Mike Workman and its COO Nancy Holleran are also IBM veterans.
