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25-Year Tech Veteran and Venture Capitalist, Mark Ashida, Joins Symform as CEO
SEATTLE, WA, Jan 23, 2013 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) --
Symform, a revolutionary, distributed cloud backup service, today
appointed Mark Ashida, former managing director at OVP Venture
Partners and Symform board member, as CEO. Ashida takes over the helm
from Matthew J. Schiltz, who is pursuing new opportunities. The
Symform board of directors and executive team agreed to leadership
adjustments to execute on its aggressive 2013 plan and support the
company's long-term vision. As CEO of Symform, Ashida will strengthen
the company's management team and drive continued momentum of its
award-winning Cloud Storage Network.
The company also announced today the appointment of 13-year Microsoft
veteran, Omri Gazitt, as senior vice president (SVP) of product
development. Symform also recently hired Bob DeSantis as SVP of
global sales and business development, who joined the company with
more than 25 years of technology industry leadership.
Symform's addition of Ashida, Gazitt and DeSantis comes as the
company is sharpening its focus on small business users and prosumers
and strengthening its strategic OEM and private label partnerships.
The company is also implementing an aggressive product roadmap and
further global expansion. In 2012, Symform achieved record-breaking
growth, expanding to 160 countries and seven billion data fragments
stored in its distributed cloud network, while securing partnerships
with three of the leading Network-Attached-Storage (NAS) vendors
(NetGear, QNAP and Synology), who together shipped over 40 percent of
entry-level NAS units globally, according to Gartner. Last week,
Symform announced a strategic investment from Second Century Ventures
(the venture fund of the National Association of REALTORS(R)).
"Since becoming a founding investor in Symform, I've been bullish on
the company's disruptive storage technology and innovative business
model and believe Symform is well-positioned to capitalize on the
burgeoning prosumer and small-business markets for cloud storage and
backup," said Ashida. "After participating on the board for four
years, I feel even more strongly about Symform and where it is headed
over the next few years. Given its success to date, the company is
attracting top-tier talent and I'm committed to creating a leadership
team that will accelerate our growth as we capitalize on a tremendous
market opportunity."
Ashida is a 25-year technology veteran who held CEO and COO roles at
several prominent startups, and serves on the board of numerous
Pacific Northwest companies. Supporting Symform through three rounds
of financing, Ashida specializes in SaaS, security, networking and
storage technologies. For the past 15 years, he has proven experience
scaling startups to fast-growing and successful businesses, serving
as CEO at PassEdge Corporation (acquired by InterTrust Technologies
in 2000) and COO at InterTrust Corporation (sold to Sony and Philips
for $450 million in 2002).
In his newly established role of SVP of product development, Gazitt
will work closely with CTO and co-founder Bassam Tabbara to
accelerate Symform's innovation and product delivery. Gazitt joins
Symform after a successful career at Microsoft and as an
entrepreneur. He most recently served as co-founder and CEO of
BuiltSteady, and spent 13 years at Microsoft in roles ranging from
architect to general manager. At BuiltSteady, he created a web and
mobile personal assistant product for consumers. His tenure at
Microsoft included roles as a GM of the .NET teams responsible for
Web Services, XML, Communications, Workflow, Transactions, Data
Access, and Modeling. Gazitt also contributed to Visual Studio,
Windows Server, Windows Azure and the 2011 release of Xbox and
Kinect.
"My passion lies in shipping great products, and I'm eager to begin
working with a really talented development team at Symform," said
Gazitt. "I'm excited about delivering on Symform's mission of
building the world's largest virtual data center and cloud storage
network."
About Symform
The Symform Cloud Storage Network is a better way to
store and backup all of your data. As the world's first distributed
and crowdsourced free online storage, Symform enables users to pay
with bytes instead of bucks. Every business on the network
contributes excess local drive space to the grid in exchange for
secure, fast and reliable cloud data backup. Before data leaves the
source device, it is encrypted and shredded, redundancy added, and
then geo-distributed across the global network. With its proprietary
and patented technology, Symform is building the world's largest
virtual datacenter using existing Internet infrastructure. Go to
www.symform.com or email info@symform.com for more information.
Symform, Symform Global Cloud Storage Network, the Resilient Storage
Architecture, and RAID-96 are trademarks of Symform, Inc. References
to other companies and their products acknowledge the trademarks
owned by their respective companies and are for reference purposes
only.
Contact:
Lindsey Bradshaw
Barokas PR for Symform
206-264-8220
Email Contact
SOURCE: Symform
http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/emailprcntct id=F2A75D06C0F7B4DB
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