Walter Hinton / Sr. Director of Field Marketing

Walter Hinton is the Sr. Director of Field Marketing. He has more than 20 years of experience in storage and networking. Most recently he served as a consultant to Hitachi Data Systems in Cloud and Big Data strategies. Prior to HDS he was Vice President of Sales and Marketing at cloud storage provider Digi-Data. Before Digi-Data he was CTO of storage service provider ManagedStorage International. Prior to that he served as Chief Strategist for StorageTek where he helped create the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). He also worked in product management at McDATA and NEC America. Walt has an MBA from University of Denver and a BA from William Jewell College.

Earle F. Philhower, III / Technical Marketing Manager

Earle F. Philhower, III has over 6 years of experience in benchmarking high performance solid state storage systems at Virident Systems. In his time at Virident he’s helped tune Virident’s products and architectures to meet the needs of customers in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. His hands-on experience covers a broad spectrum of enterprise use cases: from databases, caches, virtualization, and HPC codes to bespoke C++ and JAVA applications.

Prior to his time at Virident in technical marketing and engineering, he spent several years at VxTel, where he was the first employee of the company. There he developed highly parallel and scalable ASIC RISC/DSP processors, from architecture to layout to application coding, and systems-on-a-chip to support the burgeoning VoIP market. At Intel, which acquired VxTel in 2001, he spent several years working on the top-level integration of extremely large communications systems-on-a-chip.

Mr. Philhower holds a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from Drexel University, Philadelphia. He received his Master’s degree in the same from University of California, Irvine. In 2006 he received his MBA from INSEAD, France and Singapore, with a focus on entrepreneurship and technology.

Sunil Samel / VP, Strategic Partnerships

Mr. Samel is responsible for establishing and managing engagements with Virident’s strategic partners. Earlier at Virident, he has also been responsible for product management and early customer wins.

Mr. Samel has over 20 years of experience spanning software, semiconductor and storage markets, and securing early wins with lighthouse customers in multiple geographies – Europe, Asia-Pacific and the US.

Before Virident, Mr. Samel was co-founder at CoWare (acquired by Synopsys) and at Six-F Systems. The CoWare technology came out of his work with a research team at IMEC Belgium, which pioneered the system level design methodology and integrated software tools for designing complex system-on-chips (SoCs). Six-F Systems was a fabless semi startup developing SoCs with a novel hardware-software architecture for concurrent, multi-standard mobile communications. Earlier, he worked with TCS, India on several projects with technology leaders like Philips Belgium, Bell Northern Research and Bell Labs.

Mr. Samel holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Institute of Technology, BHU, India and a Master’s degree from the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Shrish Jamthe / Senior Director Systems Engineering

Mr. Jamthe is responsible for Systems and Performance Engineering at Virident Systems. His focus is to ensure that Virident FlashMAX extreme performance is well utilized by the application layer. At Virident, he has also led the product development for Virident’s NOR Flash-based MySQL Appliance. Prior to Virident, he was vice president of Financial Research Systems at Putnam Investments, where he designed and developed large research database and investment models for both equity and fixed income investment. Prior to Putnam, Mr. Jamthe was co-founder and CTO of revolutionary mobile startup Coola Inc. He brings more than 20 years of experience in designing and deploying technology at large corporations. He began his career at Tata Motors, India’s largest automobile company.

Mr. Jamthe holds an MBA from Boston University and a BS from National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India.

Kunal Vasavada / Systems QA Manager

Mr. Vasavada has been with Virident for over four years. As a Systems QA Manager, Mr. Vasavada supervises Virident’s quality control department, making sure products meet company and customer standards.

Before being promoted to Systems QA Manager, Mr. Vasavada was a Pre-Sales Systems Engineer at Virident. Before leading this position, he was a member of Virident’s technical staff working closely with Sales and Marketing group at Virident.

Mr. Vasavada started his career with the flash storage company as an Applications Group Intern in early 2008. He holds Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from Gujarat University, India and Master’s in Computer Science from Northwestern Polytechnic University, USA.

 

 

FlashMAX

FlashMAX delivers unconditional performance that scales across diverse workloads and data sets, and sustains over time. It offers the industry's highest storage capacity in the smallest footprint while delivering 2x the performance of competing solutions.

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