Network Appliance has announced a management reshuffle and a slew of new products as the network attached storage (NAS) vendor rallies around a new push into the enterprise space.
To spearhead this new focus on the enterprise space, the company has enticed former EMC headliner Michael Burnie to cross the floor and join Network Appliance.
Burnie is regarded by some as the man who took EMC from virtual obscurity in Australia five years ago to a company of around US$80 million by the time he left in 1999. Effective from the first of this month Burnie comes in as Network Appliances managing director Australia New Zealand and has the task of replicating his EMC success with Network Appliance.
"I'm looking forward to the opportunity of doing it again," Burnie told assembled media at a Network Appliance briefing yesterday. "EMC was [visionary] for its time and I think Network Appliance is [visionary] now."
Former Network Appliance MD, Michael Bosch, now assumes a wider role as the company's regional marketing director.
The crux of Network Appliance's new enterprise focus and new product offerings is to use bandwidth more efficiently, deliver content faster and make the whole process easier to manage. But the challenge it faces now is convincing the enterprise market that Network Appliance is the vendor to do this, and then convincing the channel to go with them.
As a result Network Appliance will offer a high-end file server range dubbed the F800 series, two new caching devices (the NetCache C1105 and C6100) and a further three software upgrades with its content delivery focus in mind.