It's a sales VP swap shop at hyperconverged startups

Hyperconverged startup Maxta has appointed Andrew Perry to be its SVP for sales.

Xangati, a privately owned and 2006-founded virtualised server performance management supplier, has appointed Steven Velardi as its VP for worldwide sales, replacing Fred Pazos, who joined Xangati in May, 2014.

So why are we interested? Perry replaces Velardi at Maxta. He joins Maxta from hyper-converged startup Springpath, where he was VP sales for 16 months, and before that, Violin Memory where he was Global VP for channel sales for 18 months, and Gridiron prior to that, being VP Sales for nearly four years.

Velardi spent two years at Maxta, joining after being worldwide sales VP at Velio Systems for 10 months and a sales VP at Infineta Systems for 19 months before that. These people don't hang around. When you lose your sales head to a direct competitor you must really regret that employment contract non-competes don't apply in certain states.

And Pazos? He's channel sales manager at Authy, an authentication company acquired by cloud firm Twilio earlier this year, joining in July this year, after spending 15 months at Xangati. His move probably precipitated the Xangati opening for Velardi, which provided the opportunity for Perry at Maxta.

Springpath, led by ex-EVault boss Terry Cunningham, now has a head-of-sales hole. If only Pazos had joined Springpath we would have a perfectly round musical chairs sequence. It must have happened some time – you could probably track such a circular VP dance on LinkedIn. I wonder what the largest and smallest such circular sequences are? ®