Start-up Atrato has made Steve Visconti, previously EVP for sales and marketing, its new CEO. The previous CEO, Dan McCormick, becomes chairman of the board and will focus more on fund raising.

The Velocity1000 is Atrato's high-performance storage array for video surveillance, digital media, government security and computing applications. It uses self-managing sealed canisters of 2.5-inch disk drives, roughly similar in concept to Xiotech's ISE (Intelligent Storage Elements). The company says its products are very energy-efficient and highly scalable. Atrato launched the product in March and partnered with Seagate in April to use encrypting Momentus drives.

In July, chief technical officer Tom Wendt moved to a video delivery company and Atrato customer called Music Giants and became an adviser to Atrato.

Now, eight months after the Velocity1000's launch, a CEO change has occurred. Startups need cash. The company raised $18m in its initial funding round and, with the current economic conditions, it is easy to see that a stronger focus on fund-raising could be needed while enabling a continued strong focus on sales. ®

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