Storage solutions vendor, NetApp has appointed Gary de Menezes to head up the South African business.
De Menezes, who is replacing Mark Ridley in the position, will also lead the SADC region and will be responsible for all NetApp business across the Southern African region.
Boasting of over 28 years in the IT industry, prior to joining NetApp, De Menezes was the regional director at Oracle and responsible for the systems business since the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle in 2010.
According to De Menezes' LinkedIn profile, at Sun Microsystems he was responsible for the development of the alliances, business partner and distribution community across East, West, Central and Southern Africa.
He was also an executive director at Lenovo where was accountable for the channel and consumer business development in SA. He was also instrumental in setting up a new business model for Lenovo since it had acquired the IBM PC business.
He also worked at HP as country manager for the company's software business as well as Acer where he was the commercial director.
De Menezes' new responsibilities include the development and execution of sales and channel strategies, expanding the NetApp customer base within the region and enhancing the partner and alliances ecosystem.
He will report to the senior director for the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Turkey, Africa, Russia and CIS region, Konstantin Ebert.
"The appointment of De Menezes demonstrates NetApp's commitment to its African growth strategy and affirms that NetApp will continue to develop and prosper in these markets, extracting maximum impact from the expected high domestic growth," says Ebert. "We have now completed our leadership appointments in Africa and the Middle East and believe strongly in their ability to lead NetApp in their respective regions."
According to De Menezes, enterprise storage has been evolving in recent years, as more data, and more kinds of data enter the digital universe, and enterprises seek the most effective ways to manage and monetise it.
"While smaller businesses are increasingly moving to SaaS applications and cloud-based storage to achieve lower costs and greater agility, most enterprises need to pursue a hybrid strategy, retaining a significant amount of storage capacity on-premises for reasons of performance, security, regulatory and compliance. The major in-house infrastructure trend among enterprises is moving away from traditional siloed NAS and SAN solutions towards the kind of software-defined scale-out storage", says De Menezes.
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